It is not often you see a player needing 12 game-point opportunities to win a badminton match, where you need just two of those to go your way. That is what it took for Supanida Katethong to defeat PV Sindhu at the quarterfinals of Spain Masters Super 300 in Madrid. The Thai shuttler squandered five chances to win the opening game, then saw Sindhu sensationally save five match points in the decider from 15-20 down, but held her nerve to win a thriller 24-26, 21-17, 22-20 in 77 minutes.
It meant Sindhu’s wait for a title on the World Tour extended further, the last one coming in June 2022. On the night, there was just much more riding on the win for Katethong, as she tries to make a late push to qualify for Paris, currently sitting just one spot outside the top 16 where she’d need to be in a month.
Sindhu pulled a rabbit out of the hat in the opening game, as she dug deep to repeatedly save game points in the end, play a stunning rally at 24-24 and let out a big roar to take the lead. The second game saw Katethong pull away from 13-13. The decider will hurt Sindhu the most as she looked good for the win at 10-5, but Katethong – coached by Sindhu’s former mentor Kim Ji Hyun – stormed back either side of the interval to lead 20-15. Sindhu’s late recovery proved to be just short, as she displayed a rare outburst of frustration, flinging the racket onto the court as Katethong sunk to her knees after converting her sixth match point.
It also highlighted how Sindhu sometimes tends to struggle against left-handed shuttlers who play up-tempo badminton. The most prominent example is, of course, Carolina Marin. In terms of win-loss differential, Sindhu’s record against Marin (5-11) is the third worst of her career at minus 6. While that could be put down simply to Marin being world-class and not just a lefty, it’s her struggles against the likes of Katethong (5-4), He Bing Jiao (9-11), Bae Yeon Ju (1-4), Sayaka Takahashi (5-4) that lends more credence to perhaps a pattern.
More recently, Katethong and Takahashi have both troubled Sindhu with their aggressive style, almost trying to replicate Marin’s. Takahashi, now retired, won her last three meetings against the Indian while Katethong has prevailed twice in Sindhu’s last two India Open campaigns before her superb win in Madrid.
Aparna Popat, Olympian and 16-time national champion, is quick to point out that this latest defeat wasn’t necessarily due to Katethong’s leftiness as Sindhu’s endurance in the end perhaps played a bigger part. But, drawing from her own career, Popat says there are some common factors that tend to bother right-handers against the opposite style.
“The first thing I’d say is as a player gets more tired, they tend to revert to habits that are predominantly formed by training and playing against right-handers. Subconsciously, if you have had success targeting the lefty’s backhand corner from your forehand, under pressure, you go back to their forehand side,” Popat told The Indian Express.
“Secondly, you need to have variations in your strokeplay. Sindhu, for example, most of the times prefers to go cross from the net. Instead of going to the overhead or backhand side of a righty that will cramp them, that now goes to the forehand side of the lefty. And more often than not, I am not quite sure why, a lefty’s forehand side is very strong.”
That point perfectly summed up the series of points when Sindhu’s lead in the decider evaporated. Both players looked exhausted, and that is when Sindhu repeatedly went to Katethong’s forehand side which eventually either drew a winner from the other side or put Sindhu behind in the rally. That is how the world No 17 made it 12-12 then 16-13, among a few other instances.
“That is where you have to be a little cognizant of these sort of nuances to figure out whether you can basically mirror your regular habits,” Popat added.
Of course the most straightforward explanation, across racket sport perhaps, is that there are simply not enough sparring partners for righties to get used to lefties. “How often can you get somebody who has a topspin like Nadal on the forehand side to practice with? It just doesn’t happen. So yeah, there is only so much you can do. It will help to watch these matches back to see if Sindhu can consciously try to flip her usual habits and also bring in a few newer strokes to counterpunch.”
Sikki-Sumeeth in semis
While Sindhu’s European sojourn ended with a mixed bag of results, there was a pleasant surprise elsewhere for the Indian contingent. The solitary winners on the quarterfinals day were Sumeeth Reddy and Sikki Reddy, the husband-wife duo producing a superb performance to defeat fourth seeds Rehan Naufal Kusharjanto and Lisa Ayu Kusumawati from a game down.
The Indians, ranked 66th in the world right now and playing together consistently only since the end of last year, won 14-21 21-11 21-17 in 41 minutes against the world No 22 duo from Indonesia. This hasn’t been India’s best category for a while now on the international circuit, so it comes as a significant surprise that the country’s last surviving contenders at a Super 300 event is from mixed doubles.
Sumeeth and Sikki will face another Indonesian challenge when they take on world No 17 and runners-up recently at Orleans Masters in Rinov Rivaldy and Pitha Haningtyas Mentari.
2024-03-29 18:07:55
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