Squash: Saurav Ghosal, Dipika Pallikal, Joshna Chinappa Win Bronze

Asian Games: Dipika Pallikal and Joshna Chinappa won the bronze medal in the women’s singles event of squash.

With three singles players in the semi-finals of the men’s and women’s draws, India were assured as many medals in the sport. However, Saurav Ghosal, Dipika Pallikal and Joshna Chinappa all lost their semi-final matches and had to settle for bronze.

First to take the court on Saturday was Dipika Pallikal, who was up against gold medal favourite Nicol David of Malaysia. Though she did put up a tough fight, her six-time Asian Games gold medal-winning opponent proved just too good as she closed out the match 3-0.

7-11, 9-11, 6-11 was the final scoreline.

This is Dipika’s second Asian Games bronze medal after she lost in the semi-finals of the 2014 Asian Games. Incidentally, it was Nicol David back then as well who had halted Dipika’s campaign in Incheon.

She is experienced and knows how to handle every situation thrown at her. She was world number one for 10 years for a reason. I am happy I played well. It’s unfortunate that I was in top-half to play with Nicol.

Dipika Pallikal

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Joshna Chinappa failed to match up to her 19-year-old Malaysian opponent Sivasangari Subramaniam, losing 1-3 (10-12 6-11 11-9 7-11)

Both the losing semi-finalists win a bronze and there is no bronze-medal play-off.

For the women though, the target has already moved to a podium finish in the team event with the 26-year-old Dipika saying she wanted to forget the defeat and focus on winning the gold in the women's team event.

We have a gold to achieve in team event. You can’t think much about what has happened in the singles. It’s hard to regroup and come back but we have to do it. We don’t want to celebrate as yet, we have a bigger target to achieve.

Dipika Pallikal

India had won the women’s team silver at the 2014 Incheon Asian Games.

In the men’s draw, top seed Saurav Ghosal lost to Chung Ming Au of Hong Kong China 12-10, 13-11, 6-11, 6-11, 6-11 in the singles semi-final.

The 2014 Asian Games silver medallist raced to a 2-0 lead in the match but his opponent then pulled off three identical 11-6 results in the following three games to close out the win.