https://www.thelocal.dk/20181112/denmark-makes-racket-over-match-fixing-chinese-badminton-players Bo Jensen, director of Badminton Denmark, wants the Badminton World Federation (BWF) to take action after seeing footage of a quarter final match in which He Jiting and Ta Qiang defeated Li Junhui and Liu Yuchen in three sets. “I am giving my support to the criticism. This is cheating, it’s match-fixing and we can’t accept it,” Jensen said to TV2 Sport. “In our context, this is just as bad as doping, and it must be punished because if it is not, we will damage the sport’s reputation amongst fans and the many sponsors that are making huge investments at the moment,” he added. Several Danish badminton players are reported to have been present during the match. Doubles pair Mads Pieler Kolding and Mads Conrad-Petersen lodged a complaint with tournament organisers following the match about the way it had been played. Another player, Hans-Kristian Vittinghus, later posted an update on Facebook in which he compared the match to a scandal during the 2012 Olympic Games in London, when eight players from China, South Korea and Indonesia were disqualified for deliberately trying to lose. “This was a complete farce of a match which made me think of the London Olympics when 4 pairs deliberately tried to lose their matches. I kid you not, it was this bad,” Vittinghus wrote, citing errors in play that “just (don’t) happen at this level”. “Difficult to get hard evidence, but if you have watched a bare minimum of world class badminton, you’d know what just happened,” he also wrote. The BWF told TV2 Sport that it would not comment on the issue prior to receiving a report from the tournament’s organisers.
The match in dispute... Watching it, especially G3, I didn't get the sense of outright match fixing or sand bagging as Vitttinghus so bitterly complains. Li/Liu never once had a service fault or hit out by a mile or hit into the net intentionally. If they were guilty, maybe of not being on fire as when they play against Goh/Tan, but they didn't even come close to the WD debacle in 2012 OG. My view of Vitttinghus has really changed after this... Sent from my SM-G965W using Tapatalk
Agreed. It was definitely a 'lazy' performance but nothing close to match fixing or wanting to lose. Seemed to me that they just wanted to play the match with as little effort as they could to win, not wanting to spend too much energy for the final. But still a pathetic performance from top pairs especially because one of them are the World Champions.
