Taking the scenic route to reach a destination is not a bad thing. The journey can be beautiful. But sometimes this can prove costly in the game. Lakshya Sen must have known all this very well after the last two weeks of hard work in Europe.
The 22-year-old from Almora in the hill state of Uttarakhand set himself another tough task after a slow start on Saturday. He recovered briefly and threatened to make a spectacular comeback, but his momentum was ruined against former world No. 2 Jonathan Christie of Indonesia. Lakshya bowed out of the All England Open Badminton Championships after losing 12-21, 21-10, 15-21 in 68 minutes.
This is consecutive semi-final defeats for the target over the past fortnight, with a total of 9 hours and 19 minutes in the eight matches when they played badminton, and an average of almost 70 minutes spent on the court per match. There was only one straight game in his eight matches when he easily defeated Denmark’s Magnus Johansen in the first round in Birmingham.
This is good news for Lakshay’s team
As Lakshya’s team insists, this is good news, as it shows how much his stamina and physical fitness have improved. The five deciding games he won among them is also one aspect in which he has improved from last year.
As we look ahead to Paris 2024, a distant dream has come true, the primary area of concern is to make better starts to the matches. Losing five of those early games saw the goals slowly trickle out of the blocks, as he did against Christie. Admittedly, this is a problem that even I know, fatigue has played a role in it.
“They were really long matches I’ve played and I could do it in preparation for the match, in recovery for the next day,” Lakshya said after the defeat in the BWF mixed arena. “Very slow start in some matches, I had a good lead in the first set, even got a good lead and then couldn’t convert the first set, three games after that.
Some of them I won but I know what I want to improve on: that’s one thing, close matches in two matches. I need to take a quick break”.
Goalies are usually at their best, playing net shots that clear the top of the tape, making them difficult for opponents to counter. Who is having a solid net game – also against Christie – the shuttle was a few inches higher than expected going into the opening game.
This allowed Christie to punish him again and again with close kills. This might have been a case of the muscles being a bit too stiff and the shots being a bit loose. These are the margins in which he had to improve because he had lost a lot of points at 6-6.
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