Mohd Arif Abdul Latif, Wang Lin and PB hit the 'jackpot' beating seeded players Hu Yun, S Nehwal and WSX respectively. BP is one of those Thai women's players who do well one week and miserably the next as seen by the round one exit of IR who reached the LNCO 2012 final last week. Goh Liu Ying, the Malaysian women's doubles player, did well to enter the QF round of both the XD and WD and hopefully she could shine in one of the matches.
^ ^ Oh no...hope its not too serious. I saw the MD match lineup for Friday and see that they withdrew.
Went to the Coliseum at 1pm to watch the 2 early matches as I was busy with personal stuffs in the late afternoon and night. I was particularly watching Riky Widianto/Richi Puspita Dili's match again the MAS pair. The first-set was quite closely fought but the second-set was a stroll for the INA pair. I like this pair and they have the ability to reach at least top 10! Contrary to a post I saw yesterday criticizing Riky's smashes, I found Riky to be quite attack-minded and many of his smashes won points for the INA pair. As for Richi, she was relatively good guarding the net, although not as superior as her senior Liliyana Natsir, but she's definitely better and less error prone compared to Shendy. I will be watching their progress closely next year as they are pitted more against the top pairs, starting from the second-seed Zhang Nan/Zhao Yunlei tonight. The newly formed INA pair Bona Septano/Afiat Yuris Wirawan was not that aggressive and the Japanese pair took every opportunity to attack them. Bona also served to the net several times and their smashes really lack bite! It took them many many attempts before finally killing the ball. My verdict is: they will not be even a top 20 pair! As for Markis Kido/Alvent Yulianto Chandra, it's typical of Kido...they were leading 11-9 at the interval and then 12-9, before finding themselves overtaken as the TPE pair found their rhythm and the INA pair made lots and lots of errors (both Alvent and Kido). So, they ended up losing 17-21 in the first-set. I left after the first-set was concluded. I also watched a bit of Xu Chen/Ma Jin's match against the IND pair and it was quite surprising to see the IND pair actually leading 13-11 and then 15-13. This made Zhang Jun concerned as he moved over from coaching Liu/Qiu to the XD match. Of course, the CHN pair eventually won the first-set 21-16 and the second-set 21-10. IMHO, the only pairs that are able to match Xu/Ma will be their compatriot Zhang/Zhao (or maybe newly formed CHN pairs), Towi/Butet, Fischer-Nielsen/Pedersen. Chan/Goh may also have an outside chance if they really really perform well. These 5 pairs are the de-facto top 5 XD pairs in the World and will remain so until new pairs have emerged.
Pai Hsiao Ma used to be Pai Min Jie Back then her results was not as succesfull as now when she change her name
