PETALING JAYA: Women’s doubles pair Pearly Tan-M Thinaah lost their final World Tour Finals Group A tie but still ended up topping their group thanks to a greater game difference.
The top seeds were defeated 15-21, 21-16, 19-21 by Japan’s Yuki Fukushima-Mayu Matsumoto in an 82-minute match at the Olympics Sports Centre Gymnasium in Hangzhou, China.
With two wins and one loss each, Pearly-Thinaah, Yuki-Mayu and Jia Yi Fan-Zhang Shu Xian were tied on two points each. However, the decider was the game difference, which is the number of games won minus games lost.
Pearly-Thinaah had a game difference of plus three while the Japanese pair had two and the Chinese duo, one.
This meant Yuki-Mayu pipped Yi Fan-Shu Xian to earn a semi-final spot despite the Chinese pair’s straight-game win over another Japanese duo, Rin Iwanaga-Kie Nakanishi, in the adjacent court.