Crowd favourites Lane/Vendy win again

In today's quarter-final, England's Ben LANE and Sean VENDY faced Taiwan's LEE Yang and WANG Chi-Lin. The two pairings have already faced each other five times in recent years - each match has gone in favor of the Asians. The second seeds Lee/Wang therefore seemed to be favored over Lane/Vendy in the eighth seed.

In the first set, they played a hard-fought match, with the Englishmen one or two points ahead most of the time, but they were never able to shake off their opponents completely. Nevertheless, they held their nerve a little longer and won the first set 21-18.

The situation for the second set remained tense: on one hand, Lane/Vendy had reached the semi-finals of the Swiss Open in 2023 and certainly had this goal in mind again. On the other hand, they had never won against their current opponents - could that change today?

The match continued with long rallies, and with applause and "ahs" and "oohs" from the crowd, the match progressed point by point towards the end of the set. The Europeans seemed to have everything under control, especially at the beginning, but Lee/Wang kept catching up and prevented the English from winning early. However, they were still unable to score more than 16 points, meaning Lane/Vendy beat Lee/Wang for the first time in their career and advance to the semi-finals for the second time in Basel.

Final result:
Ben LANE/Sean VENDY (ENG) [8] vs. LEE Yang/WANG Chi-Lin [2] (TPE)
21-18, 21-16