Kanpur: Neer Nehwal and Kuhu Sharma caused an upset in the final, defeating top-seeded players, and won the men’s and women’s group titles of Yonex Sunrise Late Sitaram Pandey memorial UP state Senior Major Badminton tournament concluded here at the indoor hall of Green Park stadium on Sunday.Second-seeded Neer of Noida drubbed top-seeded Siddharth Mishra of Lucknow in two straight games by 15-10, 16-14. For Neer, the first game was an easy affair in comparison to the second one, in which Siddharth challenged him for each point. The two led the games simultaneously and got parity several times.At the final stage of the game, luck favoured Neer and he earned two points in a row and won the title. Neer, earlier in thesemi-finals, drubbed third-seeded Siddharth Salar of Lakhimpur Kheri. Siddarth Mishra had beaten Rajan Yadav of UPP.Kuhu, a top-seeded player in the Under-17 and Under-19 groups, was lucky. The Agra girl outplayed her fellow city player, top-seeded Divyanshi Gautam, who left the game and match when she pulled a leg muscle. By that time, Kuhu was leading by 21-19, 8-2. The first game between the two was well contested. There were long rallies for each point. Both displayed attacking and defensive games.The pair of Archit Sinha (Unnao) and Shivam Verma (Lakhimpur Kheri) defeated Ayush Agarwal and Daksh Gautam (Agra) to clinch the winner’s trophy in men’s doubles. In the women’s doubles final, the pair of Riddhi Bhardwaj & Shruti Chauhan (Hapur/Noida) won the title by defeating Neha Pal & Vibhuti Sinha (Varanasi/Unnao) by 15-4, 15-5.The pair of Abhyansh Singh and Ridhima Singh from Varanasi clinched the winner’s trophy in mixed doubles by defeating Ashmit Singh (Sonbhadra/Hapur) and Riddhi Bhardwaj 15-9, 15-9.The chief guest, Jagadguru Swami Satishacharya, along with Arun Pathak (MLC), Manoj Pandey (Chairman), Dr Gunjan Pandey, and Sanjeev Dixit, awarded the winners a cash prize of Rs1,00,000 and certificates.
