Young badminton players to face top stars in selection trials for Asian Games
Top stars like Kidambi Srikanth and Lakshya Sen will face a young brigade led by Orleans Masters champion Priyanshu Rajawat at the four-day BAI (Badminton Association of India) selection trials for the Asian Games starting here on Thursday. World Championship (2021) silver medalist Srikanth and Commonwealth Games champion Lakshya have been out of form for a while now and will have to prove themselves against Rajawat, national champion Mithun Manjunath and Tokyo Olympian Sai Praneeth at the Jwala Gutta Academy here. There will be a chance.
Apart from these players, Maisnam Miraba, Bharat Raghav, Ansal Yadav and Siddhant Gupta are also in the fray in men’s singles. BAI has been conducting selection trials for major team championships since last year and players ranked in the top-20 in the BWF (World Badminton Federation) world rankings are directly selected into the team. The Asian Games, to be held in Hangzhou, China from September 23 to October 8, 2023, will have separate team championships for men and women, followed by individual events.
In this, India can send a maximum of two entries in each event. Nine men’s singles players and eight women’s singles players will contest for three spots each in the trials. There will be matches between four pairs each in men’s and mixed doubles and three pairs in women’s doubles. The selectors have proposed to select one pair each in men’s and women’s doubles and two pairs in mixed doubles through a round-robin tournament format. HS Prannoy, former world champion PV Sindhu, men’s doubles pair of defending Asian champions Chirag Shetty and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy along with women’s doubles pair of Gayatri Gopichand and Trisha Jolly have already made it to the Indian team on the basis of world rankings.
