Ashmita Chaliha had 5 match points against Danish Line Kjaersfeldt at the Thailand Super 300 on Thursday, playing the decider. She blew them all, losing the set 29-27 and the match 21-19, 13-21, 27-29. She had started well taking the opener, and then come up short at finishing.
Kiran George was 19-16 up in his decider against Lee Cheuk Yi, before losing 22-20, 15-21, 20-22. Again, a fine start, and then a botched finish.
B Sai Praneeth saved two match points in Friday’s quarters in the second set against Li Shifeng, narrowed a 18-12 deficit to 18-16 in the third, before the Chinese hopped away to a 21-17, 21-23, 21-18 win in 83 minutes. A fighting middle game for the Indian, but ran out of fuel at the crunch.
You could blame it on mental fragility in each of those cases, that nebulous entity, called mind strength. But every seasoned coach would tell you poor close finishes like these, stem from lack of physical fortitude. Or at least the under-confidence in physical strength that nags the exhausted mind in those clutch moments, and drags performances down when fitness fails.
Conversely, every big title run for Indians, has come on the back of solid physical fitness – be it Sai Praneeth’s own Super Series title after Mulyo Handoyo intervened to shore up his fitness, Kidambi Srikanth’s dizzy run of 2017, each of Saina Nehwal’s 10 Super Series titles, and every PV Sindhu triumph.
Mental weakness gets a bad rap in narrow loss margins. But players need to be in peak physical condition – over five successive tournament days, and more in finals than in Round 1 – for them to leave behind that mental brittleness and for the titles to start flowing again. Five match points frittered the way they were, denied Chaliha an important win over an international opponent. And titles seem a fair distance away for her, if the fitness doesn’t prop up soon enough.
Mental weakness gets a bad rap in narrow loss margins.
Aakarshi Kashyap, who’s hoping to be at least India’s No 2, and basically contending with an ageing Saina Nehwal, once lost 30-29 to Busanan Ongbamrungphan after holding a bunch of match points at the Syed Modi. She was a fighter in dragging the former Top 10 Thai into that position, but had no firepower to finish.
It has been coach Pullela Gopichand’s persistent contention for the longest time that it is 100 percent physical fitness, and players feeding off that feeling of their bodies being able to play the possibly punishing third set, that crystalises into mental strength. But lack of confidence in their own fitness, can hand over the edge to rivals, and is chiefly responsible for why serial winners on the domestic circuit amongst the young brigade, are ill-equipped to win internationally. The pace is a notch higher, and if you can’t whir the hand speed at the finish, then the shuttler is a goner.
Ashmita is one of India’s most talented stroke-makers, and as a southpaw, capable of much more. However the nature of the Kjaersfeldt loss reiterated why her sub-par fitness, can drag her down.
Fitness can’t be an after-thought after leaping up onto the international circuit in badminton. It will need to be the base of training, the air fed into a trampoline mat that keeps it buoyant and jumpy, before India’s second rung even start playing on the circuit, if they have to avoid early exits which has been the trend all of January and now start of February too.
There’s a reason Chinese shuttlers transitioning into seniors, deliver results straight up – endurance is the bedrock of their games, before they go swooping down on titles.
It’s certainly not something that is learnt on the go. Both Nehwal and Sindhu arrived on the international scene physically very strong, and remained injury-free in their early years, owing to the conditioning, before any of their hobbles happened. But both were ready for the rigours. And so it goes that international exposure needs to be earned. And there is hardly ever a settling-in period afforded once you get onto the treadmill of tournaments, as ranking races swamp the rookies.
In an Olympic qualification year, above all else, being circuit-ready physically will be most important for the likes of Mithun Manjunath, Kiran George, Priyanshu Rajawat and the women, Malvika Bansod, Ashmita Chaliha, Anupama Upadhyay, Samiya Farooqui and Aakarshi Kashyap. For opponents will only get harder.
When Kiran George lost to Lee Cheuk, he ought to have known he’s run into badminton’s most prolific three set player. The eagle-eyed website Badminton Statistics, has Lee Cheuk on top of the charts for players who often wind up in the third set (55.6 % – 15 of his 27 matches), though he wins only 40 % of those and can be beaten. But not if you don’t know what to do with a 19-16 lead.
Perhaps the biggest breakthrough on the Tour in men’s singles has come from Kunlavut Vitidsarn, already a World Championship finalist, and a Top Ten staple by now. His strokes were crisp and clean. But not enough. Even a high achieving youngster like him ceded that he had to inculcate additional running sessions twice a week in his training for endurance, to finally nail down Viktor Axelsen.
Those finishing fumbles come either from flagging stamina. Or from trying to rush towards victory – stabbing at a shuttle rather than placing it. But both are symptoms of not being physically prepared for the long haul, as matches are routinely nearing the hour mark now. Trying to wrap up matches in two sets, because you can’t guarantee staying on top of your fitness in the third, leads to a majority of impatient errors. If a shuttler can back herself for one right scrap in the third at all times, knowing she has that fitness, then she is better placed to negotiate the whole match mentally on that bulwark of fitness.
Badminton legend RudY Hartono of Indonesia went to extremes, but what he once said points to just how basic a necessity fitness can be, even for a fine stroke player. For the All England in March which he won a record 8 times, he would start in October the previous year. “Every single day, wake up in the morning and prepare for All England. For those 10-odd years, it was a routine. My holiday was Saturday evening upto Sunday noon. Sunday 4 pm, I’d start with running and skipping. If I didn’t train a day, I’d feel like everything’s wrong,” he says.
Prakash Padukone has written an account, where he mentions how two hours before the match, he found Hartono skipping a thousand of his ‘double unders’ – high jumps so the rope passes twice under the feet.
“Look, endurance meant I had to be prepared for players stretching me to one hour. If you had to play one hour, you had to simulate that for 45 minutes atleast back then. That was 6000 jumps. That day when Prakash came into the hotel was match day, so I did just 3000,” Hartono had recalled very coolly.
Top players save their best for the last. But that comes with the confidence that they will be the last person standing. Even when it goes into the third. Ashmita matched Kjaersfeldt for every stroke. But she couldn’t finish when it mattered. It seems to be the recurring theme with India’s second rung.