Sindhu didn’t look sluggish, but she certainly seemed out of ideas.
Never mind cold or hot, revenge isn’t best served raw. Sadly, the Premier Badminton League hadn’t ripened well enough in its second edition for PV Sindhu to reverse her Rio Olympics result in front of her home fans. They made no pretence of getting behind their franchise lead – Carolina Marin, but Day 1 of a new year, of a new league with a new scoring format was all way too new for Sindhu to deliver a new result than what panned out at the Games.
It was too early in the PBL for the 21-year-old to work up a frenzy – much need if she was to quell the frenetic speed that Marin summoned. Nether Rio nor Dubai – where the two traded wins – were good enough indicators of what would happen on Sunday at Gachibowli. Playing in front of the home crowd can play tricks with you, which combined with Marin’s overhead deception can stalk you through the match.
Marin ruled at the net, and had her most dependably risky midcourt drops which invariably trouble Sindhu when coming off that left-handed angle. The Spaniard was accumulating errors and winners at equal pace, with Sindhu forced to max her cross-court smash to get out of trouble. She would take the lead, winning the opener 11-8.
Sindhu didn’t look sluggish, but she certainly seemed out of ideas. But nobody comes fighting out of corners like India’s latest champ, and while snapping at Marin’s heels in the mid-set, she would bring out her best game.
At 7-9 – just two points away from a straight sets loss – she would play one of the most audacious corners and then use that enviable confidence in her big game in the direst of desperate situations to come back from 8-10 down to winning the set 14-12.
The mid-point of the match was perhaps what the crowds trooped in to watch. It was 10-all, Sindhu fighting to stay in the match, Marin pushing to wrap it. The 23-year-old Olympic champion would pick a shuttle high to her backhand with a round-the-head swat instead, but it wasn’t the arcing elbow that won her that point. It was the immense control on her wrist which sent the bird flying to Sindhu’s top backhand – except the Indian is not in assured possession of the same overhead that Marin’s known for.
So even if Sindhu would stem the flow with a quick kill of a smash for an 11-11 and win the set, she couldn’t pull this her way through to the end. Like at Rio, Marin went into the third brooking no argument from the tall Indian. 3-0 up, she perhaps told herself that the home pressure was wilting her opponent, and she was the assigned Hyderabad Hunter. That juncture was Reason No 2 why it was a packed house for this dazzling on court rivalry to be followed across the world.
Who-blinks-first contest
It was a 52-shot rally. High pace, top quality strokes, uncompromising defence and then the unblinking contest. For most part, cross-courts moved along the path of a pendulum, as the crowd sighed and swooned and dissolved petty loyalties to team or player into a genuine appreciation of the high speed aerial exchanges – mostly above shoulder height. Marin prevailed in that one.
Sindhu has shown this entire year – the last year, we mean – that she is upto it for long rallies after long rallies. But she wasn’t on this day as Marin stomped away, like when she took the Olympics final away in the dying seconds. “We were both nervous because it was our first match,” Marin would say later, stressing though that she could jog back her focus at crucial points. “Sindhu was nervous playing in front of her home crowd,” she would add.
It’s not easy. Saina Nehwal took almost five years to win her first title at home – and there’s that one more thing on the to-learn list for Sindhu, whose outrageous ability in winning a silver at her first Olympics means some gaps in her learning will need to be plugged very publicly. She lost the last set in a bruising 11-2 way, and perhaps missed her chances given Marin was wheezing a tad and blowing her nose into a kerchief mid-set, clearly not at her supreme fittest.
The 11-pointer might well be the scoring format of the future, but it starkly pointed out why the watching public might feel short-changed. Here was a rivalry that was spicing up with a set apiece at the end of the second. Had it been a 21-point game, both players could’ve displayed more evolved tricks than the tame way in which the decider eventually ended.
It wasn’t just that Sindhu lost – Hyderabad won the tie 4-3 eventually – but for the day’s main contest, the Marin-Sindhu match seemed to have ended abruptly when the endgame’s twists and turns were cut short, only so that life and the TV package could move on at a manic breakneck pace.
