The Japanese hop around the court for the most part retrieving her swift, steep smashes, but PV Sindhu has ended up the final\u2019s bunny a second time this year.<\/p>\n
Twenty-year-old Akane Yamaguchi summoned all her tenacity and tactical nous to hand the Indian a finals\u2019 defeat at the hands of a Japanese for the second time in five months. The 15-21, 21-12, 21-19 loss in 94 nerve-wracking minutes at Dubai\u2019s Super Series Finals final won\u2019t quite set alarm bells ringing \u2014 Sindhu\u2019s still only 22 and with so much scope to improve. But she will step up efforts to improve her clutch-play technique, given that both the Japanese \u2014Yamaguchi and Nozomi Okuhara at the Worlds \u2014could freely play their natural games in closing out the two finals, while Sindhu couldn\u2019t assert her style in clinching the big points when it mattered.<\/p>\n
She would shrug it off saying, \u201cIt was fine,\u201d and offer no excuse, but the Indian had struggled the whole week with a cold that left her breathless in the second set, even after she held a 21-15, 5-0 advantage and looked well on her way to finish this nearly-there 2017 with a big title.<\/p>\n
It is now pretty evident that the way to beat the Japanese \u2014both runners, but with vastly different repertoires of their kill-shots \u2014is in short, snappy rallies, almost playing the men\u2019s singles game of charge-and-kill at the net with precise hits and zero errors. It\u2019s what fetched Sindhu the Olympic wins against ominous names like Tai Tzu Ying and Okuhara, as well as the career 5-2 advantage over Yamaguchi \u201410 inches shorter than her \u2014going into Sunday\u2019s final. But that demands a high level of speed and explosive power from Sindhu to nip the retrieves before rallies drag the Hyderabadi into a lull from where getting out becomes difficult. With a runny nose, and the ensuing woozy head that messes with clarity of thinking, she was in no position to keep a high-intensity game scrunched into short points.<\/p>\n
Plan B is staying in the longer rallies with the Japanese, and drawing out errors, which Sindhu did for the most part, making the agile Yamaguchi chase down the bird for some heart-stopping exchanges. But like the 73-point rally in Glasgow, Sindhu\u2019s perseverance through the long back-and-forths (she won myriad rallies of 33, 41, 40, 31 and 51 shots), though spectacular to watch and gasp at, were depleting her of oxygen in the lungs.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s little to be done when Yamaguchi kept picking every shuttle and simply took off with five-point surges in Game 2, and Sindhu staved her off leading till 14 in the decider. But this was a familiar Japanese ploy to relentlessly chip away at the Indian\u2019s resolve even while they turned attrition into an art.<\/p>\n
Counter<\/p>\n
The Japanese deception is not in the wrist, but in the legs. Sure Sindhu, ranked 3 in the world currently, was catching Yamaguchi napping on shuttles sent to her far back, forehand corner (even while exploiting Sindhu\u2019s forecourt lunge to the right with the cross drops), but the World No. 2 Japanese had trained hard to counter Sindhu\u2019s height advantage.<\/p>\n
\u201cI could tell that Sindhu was getting a little bit slower but I had enough energy and had practised a lot for her. I\u2019d trained on my speed to move a lot quickly because I knew my opponent was tall,\u201d Yamaguchi said later.<\/p>\n
The fleet-footed Japanese literally ran yards on her feet to negate Sindhu\u2019s superior hitting span, even though Sindhu\u2019s cross-court sliced drops from mid-court showed her to be better prepared than in Glasgow.<\/p>\n
Exhaustion had crept in as a factor for both \u2014at 13-13 in the decider, a long rally would end with Sindhu\u2019s jabbing drive leaving Yamaguchi an inverted spread-eagle on her back on the floor. Every point conceded was like a choke start to draw from the last drops of fuel as the two stayed neck-to-neck, with manically summoned surges of pace and power.<\/p>\n
Sindhu had done well to stalk Yamaguchi to 19-all after handing her the lead at 15. It was at this juncture that all the ill-fated moments and poor judgments of the Glasgow Worlds jingled back like a bad penny.<\/p>\n
First came the doomed low serve \u2014otherwise a great attacking option, but here botched \u2014with Yamaguchi thwacking it back at Sindhu\u2019s body unsettling her. And then, the two errors into the net \u2014the one at 20-19, a half-cooked backhand flick \u2014were so reminiscent of the Worlds that the voodoo had d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu written all over it.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought I would play a rally, but then it went into the net. It was just not my day,\u201d Sindhu would say echoing a cold evening from August in Glasgow. All that could go wrong, did. And another Japanese emerged winner.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat push into net at 19 (which gave Yamaguchi her match point) could have been the story of the match, so it was similar to the World Championships,\u201d coach Pullela Gopichand would say later, adding, \u201cBut, she\u2019s matured from the Worlds. She wasn\u2019t mentally quite there in Glasgow. Here she was fighting much harder.\u201d<\/p>\n
No excuses<\/p>\n
The coach maintained he was proud of her \u2014given she wasn\u2019t at 100 per cent. \u201cI\u2019m not going to feel very bad about it. She was out of breath in the second, and taking time to recover. With a nose block, you can\u2019t think as clearly, and there\u2019s no explosiveness. But overall, I\u2019m happy, because whole season no one\u2019s played as much as her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her height is a double-edged sword. \u201cShe\u2019s a big lanky player and there\u2019s usually a tendency to let go off shuttles. But not her, she\u2019ll stretch and bend and lunge and pick almost everything. I\u2019m very proud of her,\u201d he would say, moments after he was seen with an expressive face urging her to give it her all when the tide had started to turn. He\u2019d even pray briefly, while his ward struggled to reach the finish line. The sands had shifted quicker than they do in the desert.<\/p>\n
Earlier, the contest had taken off to the din of Indian expat fans who came wearing cricket jerseys from the 90s and armed with witty slogans.<\/p>\n
Soon \u2014 and like happens with badminton matches involving Sindhu \u2014 screaming didn\u2019t seem like the best thing to do as the battle swung titanically. Most hoped it wouldn\u2019t go the Glasgow path, though that was exactly where it was headed, with another opponent with the same set of tenacious nerves, and springs for ligaments in her tibia-fibula foot-spokes.<\/p>\n
Yamaguchi breathed badminton when she was as young as three \u2014starting out in the sport following her elder brother in Fukui prefecture.\u201cHer first coach was probably her father,\u201d says Haruo Shikaya, a seasoned journalist from Japan and Akane-chan, as she is fondly known, was the youngest to claim a women\u2019s singles Super Series title when still at school. \u201cWhen she won the Japan Open SS in 2013, she was more popular than Nozomi. But now I think it\u2019s Nozomi because she won bronze at Olympics and gold at World championships. Now that Akane wins SS Finals title, maybe Akane will become more popular again,\u201d Haruo states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Japanese hop around the court for the most part retrieving her swift, steep smashes, but PV Sindhu has ended up the final\u2019s bunny a second time this year. Twenty-year-old Akane Yamaguchi summoned all her tenacity and tactical nous to hand the Indian a finals\u2019 defeat at the hands of a Japanese for the second […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14262,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[122],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14261"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14263,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14261\/revisions\/14263"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}