It was a day to celebrate for the Indian badminton fans, as the men’s doubles pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty and the men’s singles shuttler Lakshya Sen reached the finals of the Hong Kong Open 2025. Both samshed past the Taiwanese challenge to reach the summit clash.
Satwik-Chirag defeated Taiwan’s Bing Wei Lin and Chen Cheng Kuan 21-17, 21-15, while Lakshya stunned third seed Chou Tien Chen 23-21, 22-20 in a thrilling match.
For Satwik-Chirag, this was a special victory as they reached a final after more than a year. Their last final appearance came at the Thailand Open in May 2024.
Talking about the victory, Shetty said: “Finals, finally. I think it’s (our) seventh final appearance. Since China Open last year, we have been consistently playing semi-finals. It’s been a while, the last final we played was Thailand Open. We are really happy but there’s still one more match to go.”
He added: “The World Championships was good, although we would have loved to play the final. But I think the pairs that we beat, coming into the World Championships, it was quite good. But having said that, yeah, really happy that we are playing a final here and finally broke that semi-final jinx.”
Reflecting on front-and-back versus side-by-side strategy, Satwik said: “If someone is dominating at the back court, we go front and back. If both sides are balanced, we shift side by side and it really depends on how we and the opponents are playing.
“Hong Kong has never been great for us. In fact, before Covid-19, we played three or four times and kept losing in the first round, just like Singapore. But this time we believed we could turn it around, and we did. As Chirag said, we are really happy to finally be in the final here.”
The star Indian doubles duo will face Liang Wei Kang and Wang Chang in the summit clash, a pair they recently defeated in the World Championships in Paris.
For Lakshya also, this marks his first major final of the year. He won the Syed Modi S300 in December 2024 in Lucknow and the last S500 final appearance was Canada Open in 2023.
The clash between Lakshya and Chen was a thriller. In the opening game, Lakshya was trailing 8-12 before scoring four straight points to level it at 12-12. With the game hanging at 21-21, the Indian showed great composure to clinch it 23-21.
The second game saw him trailing 17-20, he came back by winning five consecutive points to seal the match 22-20.
Lakshya takes on world number four Li Shi Feng of China in the final.