All England Championships 2019: Fancied Indians get tough draws, but PV Sindhu has the form to defy odds

After picking and choosing the tournaments they wanted to participate in, during the first two months of 2019, India’s shuttlers will be at full strength at the All England Badminton Championships, a World Tour Super 1000 event that kicks off at the Arena Birmingham from Wednesday. The top four Indian men and two women who merit places among the top 32 in the Badminton World Federation (BWF) rankings have all thrown their hats into the ring, with three of them being seeded among the top eight in this prestigious, tradition-drenched $1 million prize money tournament. The highest Indian seed in either of the singles draws is World No 6, PV Sindhu, who has been favoured with the fifth seeding due to the absence of the higher ranked reigning world and Olympic champion, Carolina Marin. The Spaniard ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee during the course of the Indonesia Masters final last month against India’s Saina Nehwal, had to be operated upon, and is current undergoing rehabilitation. [caption id=“attachment_4889361” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of PV Sindhu. AP[/caption] Sindhu has been distinctly unfortunate in drawing a really tough opponent in her opening match – South Korea’s Sung Ji Hyun, who was once as high as World No 2, but has since slid down to the tenth rung in the BWF ladder, and narrowly missed being seeded. Sung has always troubled the willowy Indian since they started playing against each other in international competition in 2012. Sindhu has an 8-6 lead over the Korean in career head-to-heads but ended up on the losing side in two of the three matches they played in the course of 2018. After losing at 19-21, 10-21 in the Badminton Asia Championships in April, Sindhu played an outstanding match at the World Championships in Nanjing in August, to win at 21-10, 21-18. Sung narrowed the chasm between them with a hard-fought 26-24, 22-20 victory in the Hong Kong Open in November. Should Sindhu win their 15th career meeting, she will go into a potentially easy second-round match against either Russian Evgeniya Kosetskaya (whom Indians have seen in the recent Premier Badminton League) or Hong Kong’s Cheung Ngan Yi. The 23-year-old Indian has beaten the Russian on the only occasion that they have met, and boasts a 5-0 winning record against the Hong Kong player. A win would take Sindhu into the quarter-finals against the dangerous third-seeded Chinese youngster, Chen Yufei, against whom she was distinctly uncomfortable when losing in three games at 11-21, 21-11, 15-21 in the 2018 China Open. Sindhu does have a marginal 4-3 lead in their head-to-heads, but has lost three of their six matches since April 2017, and would need to be at her best if she were to progress. All these players are in the bottom half of the draw, in which the seeded players are 2017 world champion and second seed, Nozomi Okuhara of Japan, and the 2013 world champion and No 7 seed, Ratchanok Intanon of Thailand. Sindhu leads Okuhara 7-6 in career head-to-heads and has won their most recent two meetings in straight games, while she is deadlocked 4-4 against Intanon, but with wins in their three most recent meetings. If Sindhu is in the kind of form that saw her steamroll all opposition at the 2018 season-ending circuit finals in Guangzhou, she could well emulate the 2015 feat of Saina Nehwal, of reaching the All England final. Eighth-seeded Saina, on the other hand, will have her hands full in lowering the colours of defending champion Tai Tzu Ying of Chinese Taipei at the quarter-final stage. For a lung-opener, Saina faces a duel against Scotland’s Kirsty Gilmour, to whom she has never lost in six career meetings. In the second round, the Indian (who will turn 29 on 17th March) will face the winner of the first-round encounter between Denmark’s Line Hojmark Kjaersfeldt and China’s Cai Yanyan. Saina has beaten the former in both their earlier clashes, but has never bumped into the 19-year-old Chinese player. Experience should get Saina through those two rounds, but then, she runs up against the artistry and deception of holder Tai, who is gunning for a hat-trick of All England titles. Saina has been unable to unravel the Tai mystique and trails the Taiwanese star 5-14 after 19 career encounters. The most depressing statistic is that she has lost to Tai on the last dozen occasions that they have clashed, her last victory coming at the Swiss Open in March 2015.Kento Momota All the Indian men have been given tough passages through potential minefields. Sameer Verma, who ended the last season on a rousing note by reaching the semi-finals of the circuit grand finals in Guangzhou, faces the 2017 world champion, Denmark’s Viktor Axelsen, who has merited the sixth seeding at the 2019 All England. The winner of this encounter plays either China’s Lu Guangzu or Denmark’s Hans-Kristian Solberg Vittinghus, who gave world no 1, Kenta Momota of Japan, a torrid time in the just-concluded German Open semi-finals. Anyone of these players could bump into China’s two-time world champion and 2016 Olympics gold medallist, Chen Long, at the quarter-final stage. India’s best male player in 2017, Kidambi Srikanth, who had a forgettable 2018 season, has drawn the seventh seeding and an opening-round encounter against doughty Brice Leverdez of France. The Guntur lad leads the Frenchman 2-0 in career bouts, with both matches having taken place last year. Should Srikanth clear his opening hurdle, he would run into either Indonesia’s 2018 Asian Games gold medallist, Jonatan Christie, or Korean Lee Dong Keun. The 21-year-old Indonesian carries a 3-2 lead into their projected clash, with wins in their last two ties – the Badminton Asia team championships last year, and the Indonesia Masters last month. Srikanth would need to be at his best to settle Christie’s pretensions. That leaves HS Prannoy and Bhamidipati Sai Praneeth as the third and fourth arms of the Indian men’s singles challenge at this All England. Sadly, only one of them can progress to the second round, for they have been drawn to cross swords with each other in their opening joust. Prannoy, who has dropped to No 19 in the world after being in the top ten for the first half of 2018, has a 2-1 lead in the head-to-head with his fellow-26-year-old and regular sparring partner in Hyderabad, who has dropped to 24th on the ladder. But this statistic could be misleading, since the two have not clashed since the 2013 Tata Open in Mumbai, and Prannoy is just returning from a prolonged injury layoff. Their winner will face off against the victor of the first-round match between Indonesia’s eighth-seeded Anthony Sinisuka Ginting and Hong Kong’s Ng Ka Long Angus. Both are tricky customers, and it will not be easy for either Indian to slip it across them. On paper, both Prannoy and Praneeth possess the wherewithal to beat the Indonesian or Hong Kong player, but the proof of the pudding will only be in the eating. There is only a solitary Indian pair in two of the three doubles events, and none of them appears to have any worthwhile chances of progressing beyond the second round. In the absence of Chirag Shetty and Satwiksairaj Rankireddy, it will be up to Manu Attri and B Sumeeth Reddy to present the Indian challenge against China’s Ren Xiangyu and Ou Xuanyi in the first round. The winning combination is slated to meet Indonesia’s eighth-seeded Fajar Alfian and Muhammad Rian Ardianto. The women’s doubles pairings of Ashwini Ponnappa and N Sikki Reddy and Meghana Jakkampudi and Poorvisha S Ram, and the mixed doubles combination of Pranaav Jerry Chopra and Sikki Reddy, all have tough opening challenges and would be flattered to make the second round. All in all, from the Indian point of view, it is PV Sindhu who stands the best chance of ending up on the victory rostrum at the 2019 All England, although it would be a mind-blowing achievement if she were to become the first Indian woman to scale the summit at what has traditionally been considered the world’s most prestigious badminton championship.