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Dubai Superseries: Cramped schedule reinforces the need to be selective to make the cut for year-ending event
If you are a thoroughbred and have excellence on your side, allied to judicious handling by your coaches in the potentially exhausting annual badminton calendar, you can achieve your objectives far better than if you have just been a workhorse, undergoing the week-in, week-out drudgery of playing in just about every tournament that the Badminton World Federation (BWF) puts your way.
The truth of this axiom was vividly brought out by a perusal of the names of the shuttlers who have made the cut for the cash-rich year-ending Superseries grand finals, scheduled in Dubai from December 13 to 17. It is a tournament soaked in the petro-dollars of the United Arab Emirates — a tournament which every player worth his or her salt wants to play, in order to shore up the bank balance.
All that Axelsen and Tai had to do was ensure that they stayed within the top half-dozen players on the basis of points gathered during the current year. There is no prize for topping this list, but there is the danger of being excluded from the grand finals if you don’t end up at least eighth by the time the final Superseries competition of the year has run its course.Despite co-incidentally playing just 13 of the possible 19 Superseries-level tournaments in the 2017 calendar, world’s current top-ranked players in men’s and women’s categories, Viktor Axelsen of Denmark and Tai Tzu Ying of Chinese Taipei, comfortably made it to the year-ending event, to be held at the Sheikh Hamdan Stadium in Dubai.
Japan’s Nozomi Okuhara, who won the women’s singles title at the World Championships at Glasgow in August, and had won the Dubai competition in 2015, did not plan quite as well as Axelsen and Tai, and narrowly missed the cut after ending up ninth, after playing only a dozen tournaments. But she had an excuse — she spent long periods out on the sidelines, battling one injury or another.
In the men’s race to qualify for the world’s richest badminton tournament, India’s Kidambi Srikanth, who was leading the pack until the end of week 47 (i.e. up to 23 November), has dropped one spot after being overtaken by South Korea’s Son Wan Ho, who has 62,980 points, compared to the Indian’s 59,500. The point of the matter is that Srikanth, who played only 12 tournaments through the year, has comfortably made the Dubai finals even after choosing to sit out the China and Hong Kong Opens, in order to rest his troublesome knee.
This line-up would mean that the ninth and tenth-placed players, Hong Kong’s Wong Wing Ki Vincent (45,880 points) and Denmark’s Anders Antonsen (45,580) will be held in reserve, and can only be included if one of the top eight is injured.
As for India’s HS Prannoy (44,110), his eleventh spot in the qualifying order gives him no more than a mathematical chance of claiming a berth in Dubai – only if a spate of injuries overtakes at least three players who have already qualified.
There is a similar churn among the women’s singles specialists for the top eight slots for Destination Dubai. Japan’s Akane Yamaguchi, who participated in as many as 18 tournaments this year, sits atop the leaderboard, with 83,710 points, ahead of Chinese Taipei’s Tai Tzu Ying (79,420), who played just 13 tournaments.
The chasing pack is more than 10,000 points behind these two, with Korea’s Sung Ji Hyun (68,900 points from 18 tournaments) and India’s Pusarla Venkata Sindhu (68,040 from 17) lying in third and fourth places, respectively. Thailand’s Ratchanok Intanon (67,720 points from 18), Spain’s Carolina Marin (62,640 from 16), and China’s top duo of He Bingjiao (52,890 from 16) and Chen Yufei (48,530 from 17) occupy the fifth to eighth berths, in that order.
Nozomi Okuhara of Japan (ninth, with 48,020 points from 12 tournaments) is the first reserve, and will miss out this time, unless one of the top eight reports injured before the event. Another Japanese player, Sayaka Sato (47,530 points from 16) is tenth in line, and India’s Saina Nehwal (44,280 from 14), is in the 11th position. Both have scant chances of making the cut.
The gap of nearly 20,000 points between Sindhu and the eighth-placed Chen Yufei clearly indicates that the lanky Indian did not need to play the Hong Kong Open to defend the points she had obtained in that competition last year. She ended runner-up to Tai for the second successive year, but what it would have done to her heavily stretched body remains to be seen.
It only reinforces what the legendary Prakash Padukone, the first Indian to win the All-England title in 1980,on the sidelines of the ongoing Tata Open International Series tournament, “I believe it is all the more important for a player to be aware of which tournaments he or she should play right from the beginning.”
“As we know, it is already a cramped schedule; and, at the international circuit, one should be careful not to overdo things, to remain injury-free. If your injury gets serious, you’ll end up missing action for six months. So, all the top players should sit down with their coaches, and pick tournaments they will play well in advance,” he had said.
Padukone’s second-in-command at the Prakash Padukone Badminton Academy in Bengaluru, Vimal Kumar, was highly critical of the views expressed by this writer in Firstpost on 25 November that Sindhu had proved me wrong by beating both Yamaguchi and Intanon, before succumbing at Tai’s hands in the final.
“I do not agree with your views on Sindhu’s tiredness levels,” Vimal wrote to me, passionately, on WhatsApp, immediately after the final. “She is slack at present, and would not have won against Yamaguchi and Ratchanok if those girls had themselves not played poorly. Secondly, I feel Yamaguchi was in a worse condition than Sindhu, and, in the Hong Kong Open, she was just scraping through, round after round.
“If you look at today’s game (against Tai), Sindhu didn’t have anything in her to test Tai. Also, Tai plays a very deceptive game, and that makes it doubly tough if you are slack. It also shows the importance of deceptive strokes, which many players lack these days. The important aspect to be remembered here is that, when a top player finds that he or she needs preparation, they should skip certain events for better results. This was required for Sindhu, as the Dubai Superseries Finals are more important, as also the events coming up in January 2018.”
“Good preparation in November does not necessarily mean that she would win in Dubai, but it would have helped her over the next two months. Hence, it is important that you do the right thing, so that you not only avoid injuries, but there would be every likelihood of your playing to your potential.”
Need one say more?
