Badminton, Pressure And VIP Bragging Rights: Thursday Was The Day To Be At IG Stadium
Thursday was the best day to watch badminton...it featured Sindhu, Ayush, Satwik/Chirag, Tressa/Gayatri, Dhruv/Tanisha. It also featured 28-year-old fierce competitor Pornpawee Chochuwong.
Thursday was the best day to watch badminton...it featured Sindhu, Ayush, Satwik/Chirag, Tressa/Gayatri, Dhruv/Tanisha. It also featured 28-year-old fierce competitor Pornpawee Chochuwong. While the Indians dug deep for some good results and some upsetting ones, the Thai pulled off a stunner against World No. 4 Chen Yufei...14-year-old Rishika Santra, a badminton trainee at a city nursery, sat with her mother in anticipation of a thriller. "I had an idea that this would be one of the best matches of the day when I looked up the schedule, and I wasn't disappointed at all," she said after the Thai shuttler completed a remarkable 17-21, 25-23, 21-17 turnaround.
"I normally go from school to attend my training in the afternoons," the teenager explained, describing how her schedule has been disrupted by the World Badminton Championships. "But today, and for the last few days, I have skipped training after school. I have been coming here with my mother, and we both have had lunch sitting under the trees of IG Stadium before heading to the badminton hall."
Rishika's mum, Mrinal, gave up her career as a Chief Technology Officer at a European medical tech firm in Gurgaon to support her child's sports career. Mrinal feels that matches like the one between Pornpawee Chochuwong and Chen Yufei are great for role modelling.
"This week I told her coach that Rishika should watch some good badminton. It is rare to see this level of badminton in Delhi."
So what did Rishika, the badminton cadet, learn? "How pressure makes a huge difference."
As Pornpawee Chochuwong fell on the court after the 84-minute thriller, Rishika sat in the tribunes, gobsmacked.
Pressure was the word of the day. Ayush Shetty's opponent Alwi Farhan, who finished off the challenge 21-19, 21-11, said later, "I think Ayush had a lot of pressure because he was playing on home soil. I feel he was done in by pressure on the court."
Pressure works in strange ways and under strange circumstances. Ayush had earlier stunned World No. 1 and defending champion Shi Yu Qi in the opening round of the World Championships in New Delhi.
Ayush admitted that the difference on Thursday evening was, "I think he was playing the second game with more confidence. He had his shots really sharp. When I had my chances, I was not getting the lines. That made the difference. He played with much more patience. I think he definitely was putting more pressure near the net. That made it tough to find the length and led to some unforced errors. That cost me the match today."
Rishika was restless because she was waiting for her idol, PV Sindhu.
While the press scrum was happening in the mixed zone, Sindhu, in a black dress, took to the court against China's Wang Zhiyi.
Sindhu, World No. 9. Wang, World No. 3.
The difference was visible in the first game as Sindhu went down 11-21.
The IG Stadium had around 7,000 vocal PV Sindhu fans packed into the stands on Thursday evening, and two girls who were barracking for the Chinese.
Shambhavi Patel, an MBA student, sat in a stand opposite the VIP seating and watched the action up close, waving the Indian tricolour.
"We saw Sindhu in a meditative state. Even though she had lost the first game, there was no hurry; she was not frazzled at all. It looked like there was a comeback on the cards."
She regrouped after the mid-game break when the score was tied at 15-all and brilliantly took control of the game with six consecutive points, fuelled by powerful winners that forced errors from her Chinese opponent.
It was pulsating, edge-of-the-seat action that got the entire stadium chanting for the double Olympic medallist.
Zhiyi not only had the challenge of the Indian crowd and facing a five-time Worlds medallist, but her mind and body weren't aligning.
In the dying moments of the game, the Chinese shuttler went down twice, once clutching her left thigh and then her right. She called the doctor onto the court and, at one point, the referee even asked her to get on with the game without wasting time. The moment seemed to have caused great distraction to the Indian ace.
The Olympic medallist admitted during her mixed-zone walk-through, "I don't know if she had an injury or maybe that was her tactic, and her way of doing it. But I should have converted that into a win. There were long rallies, and it was a good match. I think at 17-all every point matters. I should have been a little more patient. It hurt a lot more because after you train and work hard for so long, losing these kinds of matches definitely hurts a lot."
After finishing her press duties, Sindhu dashed off to meet the fans. She did not disappoint young Rishika either, who was able to add a PV Sindhu-signed cap to her list of badminton memorabilia.
Elsewhere, an extravagant dinner was being laid out for the press corps and officials as Sat/Chi began their journey in this edition of the World Championships in the round of 16. Their first game began as the dining room, with TVs broadcasting badminton, gradually swelled. By then, some journalists were hammering away at stories on Sindhu and Ayush and what their losses would mean for a big badminton weekend coming up in the national capital. The selfie-loving gentry of NCR who will adorn the VIP seats over the weekend can expect two things: great badminton and few Indians on court.
Sat/Chi's late-evening surge saved the day for India. They trounced Malaysia's Junaidi Arif and Roy King Yap in a thrilling men's doubles round-of-16 clash (21-23, 21-19, 21-17) in the BWF World Championships on Thursday.
India's women's doubles and men's doubles pairs will be up for a double Chinese delight on Friday. They are the last role models left in the competition to invite more like Rishika Santra to the tribunes of IG Stadium.
And for the Capital's swish set, who had been waiting to brandish their weekend VIP passes to badminton, missing Thursday would mean being cruelly deprived of some very important bragging rights.
PV Sindhu
Chirag Shetty