Sh­er­nice Thomas

The Chi­nese As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (CATT), hosts of the fourth edi­tion of the 2011 Open Bad­minton Tour­na­ment, will be hop­ing that play­ers turn up for to­day's match pro­gramme cur­rent­ly tak­ing place at the Chi­nese As­so­ci­a­tion courts, St Ann's. On Sat­ur­day vice pres­i­dent of CATT Jonathon Chin Lee, served off the first shut­tle at 5 pm to mark the com­mence­ment of the tour­na­ment. When con­tact­ed by the T&T Guardian yes­ter­day, Can­dice Neekim, a mem­ber of the as­so­ci­a­tion, said the tour­na­ment sched­ule was very bad­ly af­fect­ed by the lim­it­ed state of Emer­gency im­posed by the gov­ern­ment to curb crime in des­ig­nat­ed hot spots. Con­se­quent­ly, all match­es were can­celled last night and moved to an ear­li­er time at 5 pm to­day.

Neekim said that the as­so­ci­a­tion con­tact­ed var­i­ous par­tic­i­pat­ing play­ers and clubs urg­ing them to at­tend the ear­li­er sched­uled match times. In the men's sin­gles, top play­ers Rahul Ram­per­sad (Cen­tral Smash­ers), Justin Siu (CATT) and Al­is­tair Es­pinosa (Shut­tle­force) all se­cured spots in the quar­ter fi­nals along with Je­w­hel Smith who up­set Ger­man, Milind Ogale to take the fi­nal spot. Af­ter tak­ing a cool 21-12, 21-18 vic­to­ry over Ra­jiv Seemon­gal-Dass to ad­vance to the quar­ter­fi­nals, for­mer na­tion­al play­er Smith, se­cured a spot in the semis when he smashed Ogale 21-17, 9-21, 21-18. Ram­per­sad will face Smith in the semis. Ram­per­sad beat De­clan Mon­deroy 21-10, 21-7 and Arun Maraj 21-12, 21-9 on the way. Join­ing the semis for a sec­ond con­sec­u­tive year, is num­ber two seed Al­lis­ter Es­pinoza af­ter he beat Roger Moore 19-21, 21-7, 21-9 in the quar­ters. Top ju­nior Siu al­so made the cut af­ter edg­ing Mark Springer 21-10, 19-21, 21-19.