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Indian shuttlers went down tamely to world champions China, who showed little mercy in spanking their unfancied rivals 5-0 in the opening Pool A match of team badminton competition in the 15th Asian Games in Doha on Thursday.
The result was by and large expected as the Indians did not have the skills to match the Chinese, who were never really tested in any of the contests at the Aspire Sports Centre.
Anup Sridhar found the going tough in the first singles as he lost to Dan Lin 19-21, 11-21 in 28 minutes while the Chinese doubles duo of Yun Cai and Haifeng Fu gave their team a 2-0 lead by accounting for the Indian pair of Sanave Thomas and Rupesh Kumar.
"I should have probably won the first set. He was pretty fast in the second set, may be my preparation was not good enough," Sridhar said after the match.
"I was not really under any pressure as I know he is a stronger player. I did'nt have anything to lose against him," he said.
In the second singles, P Kashyap put in a spirited performance but it was still not good enough to see him go past Jin Chen who carved out a 21-17, 21-19 verdict in 30 The Indians were left trailing 0-4 after the second doubles as the Chinese pair of Zhendong Guo and Zhongbo Xie prevailed over V Diju and Vidhyadhar 21-18, 21-8 in just 22 minutes.
In the third singles, India's star player Nikhil Kanetkar never really found his rhythm going as he lost to Chunlai Bao 14-21, 12-21 to complete a miserable day for the Indians on the badminton courts.
India will take on Indonesia in their second Group A league match later in the day and need to pull off an upset win to entertain hopes of making it to the semi-final stage.
As per the format of the team event, there are three pools of three teams each and the champion team from each group moves into the semi-finals. The runner up teams from each group then play a round robin league to determine the fourth semi-finalists. minutes.