Japan’s Koki Watanabe reacted to his loss to Viktor Axelsen in the China Masters opening round:
“I worked hard with the mindset of challenging myself against the best, but I still feel that there’s a lot of room for improvement. I think I rushed my attacks and ended up making more mistakes than my opponent.”
“Since I’m not very tall, I have to dive and stretch to retrieve shots. Because of the angles in my opponent’s smashes, I knew I had to be persistent and return as many as possible to have a chance to win. That’s why those kinds of rallies increased.”