Lee Zii Jia’s title defence at the Badminton Asia Championships wilted in the first round as he suffered a 19-21, 16-21 defeat against an in-form Angus Ng Ka Long in Dubai on Wednesday.
This was Lee’s second consecutive defeat against the shuttler, who beat him in the Indonesia Masters second round in January.
Lee, who was seeded third, had his best spell of the entire match in the opening few minutes as he started off promisingly enough to take a 10-5 lead.
But Angus soon grew into the game, and he soon swiftly evaporated the Malaysian’s lead to turn the tables with a solid all-round display to take the opening game.
Angus continued to dictate proceedings in the second game and forced Lee into continuously lifting the shuttles which he killed off to rack up the points.
Lee was clearly struggling with the pace of the game, and simply could not find his rhythm to cave in disappointingly after 39 minutes.
It was a dour day at the office for the Malaysian contingent, who mostly followed Lee out the exit door in the first round including Ng Tze Yong, Goh Jin Wei and S. Kisona.
At the time of writing, only men’s doubles pairs Ong Yew Sin-Teo Ee Yi and Man Wei Chong-Tee Kai Wun survived Wednesday's action.
Ong-Teo came from behind to beat M. R. Arjun-Dhruv Kapila 12-21, 21-16, 21-12 to set up a meeting with Japanese pair Ayata Endo-Yuta Takei, while Man-Tee has an upcoming showdown with Japan’s fourth seeds Takuro Hoki-Yugo Kobayashi.
Mixed doubles pairs Goh Soon Huat-Shevon Lai and Chen Tang Jie-Toh Ee Wei also see second-round action on Thursday after winning their respective matches on Tuesday.
