The China Open Super 1000 Round of 16, mirrored the career of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty – a swell start, needing to dig deep and learning to stay calm and battle discomfiting zones along the way.
Playing Leo Rolly Carnando and Bagas Maulana, a juggled Indonesian pairing, Satwik-Chirag were dragged into now what is a familiar flat game – demanding a set of strokes that they have literally had to learn anew, by unlearning their natural repository of aggressive down strokes. It’s literally a tilted axis – not many leaping smashes north to south, just a lot of angular whizzings east to west and diagonal.
Crouch, chisel a clever curler, crunch a point. Rinse, repeat. 21-19, 21-19 in 43 minutes for the day, recorded.
Having repeatedly been caught off guard on the literal receiving end of funky spinning, shooting, squirming serves over the last 18 months, the Indians showed glimpses of coming to grips with a weapon the Indonesians and Malaysians have been liberally using against them.
This they have been doing by tweaking their crouching stance, keeping their heads and biding their time while puncturing the fear around the serve. They stub it with some aggression now, and use racquet angles to shake off the fanged poison.
But just like their career the steep inclines invariably follow the smooth sailings. Except now they arent caught unawares having faced literally every calamitous situation in the past year. So even after they had broken away at 16-all to take the opener 21-19, things got ticklingly unfunny in the second.
Chirag told the BWF, “It was quite topsy turvy, back and forth, we didn’t really have a sizeable lead, neither did they. At some point we were leading 2 points. They led by 2. Eventually at 16, we finally had that breakthrough when we got 3-4 points in a row. And we could close out that first game..”
But, for there’s always a but.
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“But we should have started that second game, a little more safe – nor safer, a little more calmer. We could have restricted them quite a bit. But they played good badminton as well. Service and receiving. But happy we could finally get that game,” he narrated.
The flat, fast game simply needs constant improvisations and endless patience, while never foregoing aggression. But every jazzed up serve dished out, needs to be dealt with. And like Satwik says, needed digging deep. And committing this debugging to muscle memory.
Satwik typically has picked a few tricks himself while trying to find their antidotes. Talking through the second set when they fell behind 10-14, he described the broad contours of resilience, to a point where the drift advantage or dis, barely bothered them. ” “Nothing, we felt both sides are quite similar. No so much of major difference. But after first game we got a lot of confidence. Like Chirag said, we were a little passive, not so aggressive on receiving. Way too many mistakes which we didn’t do in first game. Then they got their rhythm. Then we again had to dig deep and here and there, had to struggle.”
The duo after a series of disappointments have learnt that turnarounds demand patience. “And overall first game was very confident actually. In second, we stuck together, even when we are down, we knew it was just a matter of one two points. One two good service, that’s it.”
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While the Malaysians Ong-Teo offer them no respite, and it might be only Malaysians the next two days given the draw, there is incremental, hard earned progress.
They will definitely cross over to play in Macau, a smaller tournament but much needed next week. “We play Macau,” Chirag informed. “Each passing day, we are definitely feeling better. Still a long way to go. I won’t say we are at our best as yet. We are happy with the way we are playing. Like, we’ve not played as many tournaments in the past year. That’s why we entered Macau.”
