Satwik-Chirag clinging onto No 1 unnecessary, fitness for Paris Olympics ought to be only goal | Badminton News

Satwik-Chirag won Swiss, Asian Championships, Indonesia, Korea and the Asian Games, and had to gulp down early exits at Singapore and China and quarters disappointment at World Championships – a rollercoaster of reacting to losses and plotting the title wins. Satwik’s taped shoulder could do without needless exerting.

Most top names from Asia are on depleted energies and niggling fitness bases, and could log withdrawals or losses in the rest of the year. Even wins will come amidst severely knackered fields and will need to be seen in that perspective with an asterisk of a fatigued competition.

Should a step-down or mini-slide happen in the coming year, and Satwik-Chirag settle in the World Nos 2-6 ranking bracket, it ought to be considered alright. The duo might not necessarily be able to withdraw from tournaments and rest it out at home or take long training breaks, because of BWF compulsions and the Olympic qualification dynamics. But a breathless craving for them to win every match from hereon with an eye on accumulating points on the non-stop treadmill that is the BWF calendar is unreasonable. Giving their teams the freedom to choose titles to target, even if it’s just one or two, is necessary.

Staying fit and fresh for the Paris Games ought to be the topmost, if not only priority. For far too many players in the past, the World title or World No 1 tags have hung like millstones around the neck, dragging them down eventually as they pursued relentless, unreal targets of keeping up with BWF’s frenzied addition of events to the calendar. The federation has its own reasonings for continuously adding events, players have the discretion to run the race at their own pace.

Indian successes in badminton at the highest level have always come from prioritizing tournaments players seek to do well at. The surfeit of injuries – both singles World champions, Thai View Vitidsarn and Korean An Se Young who are not yet 23, struggling – are warning calls to Indians to be very smart about their scheduling, and ignore fan rants on social media, that pass judgments on form with no inkling of fitness concerns and niggles and howl at losses without wanting to even understand the concept of peaking.

Every Indian player has a team of coaches, trainers, and doctors around them, best equipped to determine their target tournaments and decide on where and when they ought to exert. Depending on body structure and propensity to injuries, targets will need to be improvised for the doubles duo, Prannoy, Srikanth, Lakshya, and Sindhu in cannily picking the tournaments to go all in.

India’s strongest fitness base for day-in-day-out badminton belonged to Saina Nehwal, a decade ago, and she made it count with 10 Super Series titles. Once injuries intervened, her style of play which relied on physical fortitude, made it difficult to stay on that treadmill.

Lee Chong Wei was the Consistency lord of the circuit giving it his all each week, while Lin Dan, in contrast, turned very picky about the Majors and strung together world wins. Straddling both is immensely difficult. More recently Akane Yamaguchi or Tai Tzu Ying experienced great success on the Tour, but Chen Yufei nailed the Olympics. She too has complained about burnouts, while Tokyo champ Viktor Axelsen isn’t too thrilled with the calendar, though his planning of peaking is meticulous. But feeling the strain at this World Championships and a subsequent pullout last week, Axelsen made the strongest case for guarding fitness over consistency stats in the long run.

For most part of her career, PV Sindhu did the smarter thing of focusing exclusively on the Majors because the power game she played needed her to put in large blocks of training ahead of big tournaments, and not go globetrotting chasing titles with high intensity every week. It was as much a choice, as a compulsion given her attacking style of play which can’t survive the high tempo for three straight weeks, and month after month.

For a tall woman with constant agility demands and needing strength reserves in her aggressive game, the week-in-week-out schedule was a non-starter. Still, she lapsed into a defensive playing style attempting a go for several titles, and that didn’t work out too well. The mental and physical fatigue of that grind – with international travel thrown in – and court mileage is enormous.

Mistaking herself to be a machine while thinking she’s capable of gunning for several smaller titles rather than a few big ones, wasn’t the smartest of experiments and she faltered at both. Going forward, Sindhu too ought to back herself to be a contender at the biggies, filling in the missing blanks like All England. She should obviously play as much as she wants, to rediscover her rhythm, but the confidence can’t be a hostage to the number of titles by bringing on the pressure of winning every tournament she enters.

HS Prannoy, another tall specimen whose power game is crucial to winning and which extracts so much from the back, needed patience through the experience of those quarters and semis to finally nail down titles and medals. But if he is to lead Indian hopes in Paris, he will need to be shrewd with how much he extends himself in the lead-up.

Lakshya Sen’s is the most curious contradiction – he’s young and capable of medalling at Paris, but his game style with reflex, retrieving defense, a callous error count, and a still-forming attack drags him into deciders, putting a strain on his shoulder. While he’s expected to go prancing around from one venue to next winning every match because he’s young and has particularly restless fans, he is yet to strike a scheduling balance. If he can turn deaf to the din of expectations, he might just find his own cadence instead of constantly trying to catch up with Li Shifeng, Kunlavut, and Kodai. India’s finest clutch player is best suited to grab the key moments, but he’ll need to stay fit.

China lost out on two Olympic bronze faceoffs when Xin Wang and Xuerui Li simply couldn’t last the rigours of turning up fit for the play-off. To their credit, Saina Nehwal and Nozomi Okuhara stayed fit to contend and get on the podium. With the plethora of injuries all around, Paris might boil down to sheerly that – turning up fit.

Consistency on the badminton circuit – winning every title on offer, week in and week out – is frankly severely overrated. It is also an outrageous demand expected out of shuttlers, and needs a calm mentoring to temper goals and expectations. Satwik-Chirag have shown they are capable of beating any pairing. Tactically and mentally, they have looked sharp when trapping down titles this year. The Worlds disappointment might well be a blessing in disguise and keep them hungry for Paris, as they plug gaps in their game. But, both tall men who have missed out due to injuries previously will know they don’t need to heed to the impatience of ever-demanding fans, nor do they need to perennially stay in headlines chasing after smaller titles. The World No 1 box is ticked. The All England and more crucially Olympics, remains. All other matches are dry runs.