Saina Nehwal’s campaign in the BWF Superseries Finals has received a fresh breath of life after her win against top seeded Carolina Marin. The ace player who had lost to her Japanese counterpart Nozomi Okuhara in her previous outing would have had to exit the tournament in the first round itself had she lost this round as well.
Her women’s singles match against Marin last an hour and 15 minutes and while she was being dominated in the beginning, she rose up strongly later to win the match 23-21, 9-21, 21-12. Now Saina would be facing her last league match against Tai Tzu Ying, the defending champion before she moves on to the knockouts. The match against Carolina was a really fierce one and Saina having won that one deserves a lot of commendation for it since it was not at all that simple.
After the loss in the first match Saina was expected to be pretty low on confidence, but she proved everyone wrong by coming out a lot positive and played and inspiring match to win it. She was also helped quite a lot as her opponent was not in that good a form and also committed a lot of errors during her game.
At the beginning of the match Saina had the lead on Carolina at 9-4, but then Marin stepped up her game and took straight 6 points to pick up the lead again. Later Saina kept going to bring it to a 15-15 level and from there Saina always made sure she had an advantage over the Spaniard until the end of the set.
Marin tried hard to get Saina as close to the net as possible to trap Saina in her shots, but her plan backfired as she made some unforced errors and the set reached 19-16 in favor of Saina. From there on the match became interesting as Marin and Saina kept going on drawing in to 19-19 and later suddenly it tilted 21-20 in favor of Marin, but made another mistake giving Saina the point by hitting a wide shot and Saina made complete use of the opportunity by grabbing the point and eventually the set.
The second set started with both players going aggressively at each other, but Saina faltered big time and Marin was able to run away with the game at such ease that the set ended 9-21 in favor of the Spaniard.
During the final set the Hyderabadi ace player again went strong and Carolina gave her a tough fight until the score became 8-11 in favor of the Spaniard, but then she again screwed it up with unforced errors and mistimed shots which gave Saina the edge over her opponent and she grabbed the opportunity with both hands and got the match home with a 21-12 set in favor of Saina.
rounak