All England Championships 2019: Indian challenge ends as doughty Saina Nehwal, fragile Kidambi Srikanth bow out

Not entirely unexpectedly, the Indian challenge at the All England Badminton Championships stumbled at the quarter-final stage on Friday in the face of distinctly superior opposition, and brought the curtains down on the country’s participation at this prestigious World Tour Super 1000 tournament.

A doughty, determined Saina Nehwal, suffering from a stomach infection, hung on doggedly to the bitter end in the face of the magical strokeplay of top seed and defending champion, Tai Tzu Ying of Chinese Taipei, in a 38-minute 15-21, 19-21 loss.

However, Kidambi Srikanth was blown off his feet in 44 minutes by the vastly superior world champion and No 1 seed, Kento Momota of Japan, by a 21-12, 21-16 verdict that shockingly appeared closer than the Indian deserved.

Indeed, the scoreline could well have been 21-12, 21-12, for Momota hovered at match-point 20-12 for a couple of minutes before relaxing his stranglehold on the encounter, burying an easy overhead smash in the net, and allowing a desperate Srikanth to narrow the margin and make the scoreline in their 14th career encounter look a mite more respectable. However, it did not prevent Momota from winning his eighth consecutive clash, and taking an 11-3 lead in their head-to-heads.

For all his footspeed and aggression, the 26-year-old Indian lacked the ability to breach the Japanese left-hander’s iron-clad defence, and also did not have the stamina to haul Momota over the coals in lengthy rallies made famous in recent times by the latter’s female compatriots, Nozomi Okuhara and Akane Yamaguchi.

Nor was the top seed guilty of the kind of errors that Indonesia’s 2018 Asian Games champion, Jonatan Christie, had committed to enable Srikanth to win their deciding game easily at 21-11 in the second round on Thursday. Most of the time, he was content to play a game of attrition, toying with his antagonist and inviting him to force the pace if he wanted a point badly.

As former four-time All England champion Morten Frost cannily pointed out on commentary, there is a fundamental difference between the levels of dominance that Chinese legend Lin Dan had achieved in his salad days, and Momota does these days. Super Dan used to literally decimate his opponents, often by single-digit scores, but the Japanese southpaw rarely goes for broke, and only does enough to canter past the finishing post.

“That is why you find players ranked much lower than Momota achieving respectable scores of 16, 17, 18 against him,” Frost said. “(Thailand’s Kantaphon) Wangcharoen reached 19 yesterday in the second round. But even if he (Wangcharoen) had taken that game, Momota would not have been troubled in winning the match. He is effective, mind you; it is only that he does not appear as dominant on the court as Lin Dan in his prime.”

Momota’s reluctance to employ pace and power from the start of the match was evident when he engaged Srikanth in lengthy rallies, maintaining an iron length on the toss, and making it difficult for the Indian cut the rallies short. Having softened Srikanth up sufficiently in the first dozen minutes of the match until 9-all, the Japanese ace then nudged the accelerator pedal to gallop to 18-9, and leave his impression on the encounter.

Srikanth never recovered from those initial body blows, and the writing was on the wall from the very onset of the second stanza. The Indian struggled to stay with Momota in the rallies, and just could not dominate the net to get the openings and midcourt returns he craves. The Japanese comfortably cleared the bird to the baseline, sending Srikanth scurrying back all the way. After 3-all, the top seed moved smoothly to 8-3, 11-4 and 14-6, to firmly shut the door in the Indian’s face.

Like the Momota-Srikanth rivalry which is skewed heavily in the former’s favour, the Tai Tzu Ying-Saina Nehwal equation is tilted even more firmly on Tai’s side. In 20 meetings since 2010, when the Indian won their first four jousts, when both girls were in their teens, the Taiwanese has extended her hegemony to 15-5, with victories in their last 13 meetings over the six years since Saina’s last triumph at the Swiss Open in March 2013.

But unlike Srikanth, who has found Momota an increasingly tough nut to crack, there was no disgrace at all in Saina’s close defeat at Tai’s hands. The Indian claims to be gradually inching closer to deciphering the Tai conundrum, and figuring out just how the 24-year-old Taiwanese uses her supple wrist at the last possible second to produce strokes of sheer beauty that leave even her rivals marvelling and mentally applauding.

“I am happy to keep playing her more often, since I can try and get closer to working out what exactly makes her tick,” said Saina, after her latest defeat at the Arena Birmingham. “It is really difficult to read her strokes because she has so many shots in her repertoire, and appears spoilt for choice in the shots that she wants to play!”

A slow start against an opponent of Tai’s calibre would simply never do; and it was hardly surprising to see the Taiwanese lead from start to finish in the first game, with a 12-3 advantage being the point where the distance between the two was the widest. Saina did fight back to reduce the margin to 12-14, but it was often because Tai was willing to go for the most outrageous of shots, even if she committed a mistake in the bargain.

The Indian was far more positive in the second game, and built up a 9-4 lead, only to have Tai catch up at 13-all with some marvellous deceptive drops that had Saina reaching forward in vain. The older woman raised visions of a third game when she neutralised Tai’s 19-16 lead, but was unable to wrest the final two points as her breath ran out in the face of the monumental effort she had had to make to restore parity.

There can be no doubt that Tai — who has consistently been World No 1 in the period since she first ascended to the pre-eminent spot on 1 December 2016 — has recovered from the waist strain that had caused her to throw in the towel at the Malaysia Masters, earlier this season. The slight hesitancy in her court positioning that had been noticed in the first two months of the year has disappeared, and she is reaching her rival’s best strokes with time to spare.

Those who had seen Tai in action in her earlier two rounds against Canada’s Michelle Li (beaten by a 21-12, 21-15 margin) and American-Chinese Beiwen Zhang (21-15, 21-14) had been entranced by the virtuosity of her strokeplay, and have revised their pre-tournament thinking that this competition would be wide open.

In fact, the top seeds have made it to the semi-finals in four out of five events, even as the top four seeds in the women’s singles have booked their berths in the semi-finals. Tai takes on Japan’s No 4 seed, Akane Yamaguchi, on Saturday, while her second-seeded compatriot, Nozomi Okuhara, clashes with China’s third-seeded Chen Yufei.

As for the men, Momota will cross swords with Hong Kong’s unseeded Ng Ka Long Angus, who has had a marvellous run in this tournament with victories over the likes of eighth seeded Indonesian, Anthony Sinisuka Ginting, India’s Sai Praneeth; and another Indonesian, Tommy Sugiarto at 16-21, 21-14, 21-15 in the quarter-finals.

The No 2 seed and defending champion, China’s Shi Yuqi, who featured in the 2017 and 2018 finals, also made it to the last-four stage in impressive fashion, without dropping a game in three outings against Denmark’s Anders Antonsen, Malaysia’s Daren Liew; and Japan’s Kanta Tsuneyama, by a thumping 21-14, 21-7 scoreline in the quarter-finals on Friday.

Shi will face off against 2017 world champion and No 6 seed, Viktor Axelsen of Denmark, who is appearing a little more like his old self after a lengthy spell of poor results due to slower-than-expected recovery from ankle surgery. The lanky Dane was stretched over the full distance by Indian battler Sameer Verma in his first outing, and also had trouble in putting away China’s Lu Guangzu (at 21-19, 21-16) and his fellow-countryman, Jan O Jorgensen, at 23-21, 21-18 in the quarter-finals.

On the evidence of what has been seen in the first three rounds of this All England, it is hard to look beyond Tai Tzu Ying and Kento Momota for the top singles prizes in this $1 million tournament.