“Today we played well despite the opponent’s rank is higher than us,” as expressed by Nagahara during the press conference.

Matsumoto/Nagahara is an unseeded pair in this tournament. They can’t believe that they can make it to the final round of a tournament with the class of World Tour Super and will see another Japanese player in the final round.

“This is our first final for this year, and we want to play our best performance in all matches and we shall see how the result will be in the end,” Matsumoto added.

On the final round, Matsumoto/Nagahara will see their Japanese compatriot, Misaki/Ayaka or Fukusima/Hirota. Both pairs are their senior and are placed on a much higher rank than them in the BWF Rank. However, Matsumoto/Nagahara will not be burdened by that facts as what matters for them is to play their best and they play against their teammate.

“The bottom line is that we are very happy because we can play in the final against another pair of the same nationality with us, hopefully we can play with fun and against anyone, we will do our best and we won’t chose who we want to play with, because we’ll lose to any of them,” Matsumoto said.

Their experience and their environment are the two factors that have helped them to keep on growing and to be able to compete against world’s top players. This has helped them to increase their performance and may shock the public in Blibli Indonesia Open 2018.

“We trained together with the top players, and there we learn a lot from our seniors and we feel the help from the training and the environment and hopefully that will help us to get better over time,” Matsumoto added.