In the early morning of Beijing time on the 21st, this season's All England Open Badminton Championships ended in Birmingham. The Chinese team appeared again after two years, only winning two runners-up, with the worst record set in 2020. Asian powerhouse Japan won the triple crown and showed strong momentum in the first major event of the new cycle.
At the German Open in the middle of this month, The National Feather played an international tournament for the first time this season, sending a new combination in the doubles event, and won 2 gold and 3 silver. Transferred to the BWF Tour Super 1000 event, known as the "Little World Championship", the All England Tournament, due to the high number of points required to participate, some of the team's old partners in the Tokyo Olympic cycle "re-emerged", with a total of seven singles players and nine pairs of doubles combinations.
The "Yellow Duck Combination", which is not in the best condition, achieved self-breakthrough in this competition.
Among them, the most stable performance should be mixed doubles, Zheng Siwei / Huang Yaqiong, who has long occupied the world number one throne, reunited to rank as the No. 2 seed, and Olympic champion Wang Yilu / Huang Dongping was the No. 3 seed. The two pairs are in the same lower half of the division, living up to the expectations of the division 4, and the "Yellow Duck Combination" is the first time to reach the top 4 in the five all-England matches. In the semi-finals, the two won 2-1 against their teammates. Unfortunately, the two lost 19-21 in the final to the defending champions Yudai Watanabe and Higashino Yusa, who lost 19-21 in two sets, and failed to break through again.
In the men's doubles, the runners-up he Jiting/Tan Qiang, who had been demolished at last year's World Championships, also "combined" again, defeating the Malaysian combination Wu Shifei/Nui Zudin, who had just won the championship in Germany, to reach the top 4, but lost to the No. 2 seed and Indonesian veteran Ashan /Steavang in the semifinals. The provisional combinations Liu Yuchen/Zhou Haodong and the previous champion Liu Cheng/Zhang Nan both lost to indonesian players in the second round.
Zhang Shuxian (front) and Zheng Yu won two consecutive races, laying the foundation for confidence in preparing for the Paris cycle.
If the old partner of mixed doubles and men's doubles is still stable, the women's doubles is in the case of the first round of the top seed Chen Qingchen / Jia Yifan out of the cold, the new combination took on the responsibility of rushing the crown. After winning three consecutive wins in Germany against South Korea to reach the top four, Jeong Woo/Jang Shu-hyun reached the final as non-seeded players. Unfortunately, against no. 7 seeds Nao Matsuyama / Chiyo Shida, who had not lost in the previous set, the Chinese duo lost 0-2. But as the two said, the all-England results are a recognition and give the new pair more confidence.
In terms of singles, the women's singles "five golden flowers" did not advance to the final, and the record is difficult to say ideal. Among them, Wang Zhiyi and Han Yue lost to the famous Players Xin Dehu and Okuhara Hope in the first two rounds, respectively, and Zhang Yiman withdrew before the "civil war" with Chen Yufei in the first round. No. 3 seed Chen Yufei and He Bingjiao successfully met, the latter withdrew, and the former was subsequently swept out by No. 2 seed Akane Yamaguchi in the semifinals. In the men's singles competition, the Chinese team, which only two participated, continued its sluggish performance. Lu Guangzu defeated teammate Zhao Junpeng in the first round and then won the No. 8 seed, Hong Kong's oo Jialang, but retired from the quarter-final due to injury.
This week, the Chinese team will also move to Basel for the Super 300 event , the Swiss Open, when the new pairs of doubles pairs will be unveiled again.
The image of this article is: the official Weibo of the World Badminton Federation