Francesca Corbett couldn’t have won herself a better birthday gift, as she and Jennie Gai pulled off the biggest win of their career by upstaging world No.4 Jia Yi Fan/Zhang Shu Xian in the first round of the POLYTRON Indonesia Open 2026.

It was their first win over a top Chinese pair and came just three days after Jia/Zhang had topped the podium at the KFF Singapore Open 2026.

The USA pair started strongly in drifty conditions, taking the opening game for the loss of just nine points. However, the Chinese forced a decider and opened a four-point lead at 16-12, only for Corbett/Gai to stitch up a five-point sequence and take the lead at the death. Jia and Zhang had one match point, but the USA duo got a lifeline with Jia’s flicked serve landing wide.

They earned their own match point and converted on the second opportunity.

“Definitely our best win,” beamed Corbett, with the sensational win coming on her 21^st birthday.

“She (Jia) has a really good serve, so I knew, like, at some point in the match, she would probably get us on one of the flicks, and I think we just got really lucky that the drift also was towards the side that she hit out on. So I was really happy that we could get one more chance to fight for another point.

“I’m a little bit in disbelief. At the very end it was really, really close, and I was just trying to keep my focus. You really have to focus in this arena, because it’s really loud, so I was just trying to focus on each point itself. I’m a little bit shocked. It’s a huge sensation.”

Gai traced their confidence to the Indonesia Masters at this venue in January, where they nearly tripped Pearly TanThinaah Muralitharan in three close games.

“The last time we played here in January at Istora, we played a close game with Pearly and Thinaah. So I had the confidence over the past year that we can play with the top players, but as Frankie said, it was just about keeping our focus at the crucial points, and not letting the crowd or the score distract us too much.

“We’ve had a lot of close games, but it always ends like not on our side in the last few points, so I thought it would happen again today, but I’m glad we were able to just encourage each other and just to keep our focus, and I think moving forward it’s still going to be very hard, but having this confidence maybe can help us do better.”

As for the birthday girl, she remembered to thank her coaches Tony Gunawan and Naoko Fukuman.

“I’m just really happy, I have really good teammates around me, and our coaches Tony and Naoko, they push me a lot and make me become a better person, so I’m happy I’m able to also be happy on the court as well.”

“We got a little cake,” added Jennie, “but we still had the match, so we just focused on that, but now we can celebrate a little bit tonight, but still focus for tomorrow’s match.”

→Results (Day 2)