World Badminton Championships 2017: Saina Nehwal loses in the semifinals

Everyone targets Nehwal at the net —making her lunge and bend. In what is within legal limits of sadism in sport, opponents make no bones about making the Indian returning from a knee surgery, put sustained pressure on that joint. Playing the soft drops to Nehwal’s forehand front corner is a bonafide tactic; only Okuhara milked it with stupendous consistency. The Japanese girl is tagged with the reputation of being a tireless retriever, which masks her ability to construct rallies that draw destructive errors from opponents.

Consistency gets a bad name often for being boring, but is a terrific skill when you can repeatedly show up your rival’s weakness. It started at 4-7 and almost a third of Okuhara’s points to level the sets came by making Nehwal lunge at the forehand corner. She was also picking the bulk of Nehwal shots that had given the Indian the muscled 21-12 lead.

Nehwal was perfect on her judgment of the backline in the opener when her tosses drew out line errors on Okuhara’s backhand. Longer rallies often saw the Japanese sail wide even as Nehwal was getting confident on her net juggles and punches. If anything, the Japanese was lulling Nehwal into believing this could be mighty easy.

Having recovered better than the Indian (both finished in late Friday session and were curiously made to play in the early Saturday session), Okuhara was bound to come into her own if matters went into the third.

When Nehwal allowed her a 0-4 lead at the start of the second, and then played loose again – serving high needlessly and spraying her smash from midcourt after doing the hardwork to level at 17-all, the Japanese was poised to give Nehwal grief. The Japanese may like the slow pace, but Okuhara has shown she can hit the top gears and got into a series of fast exchanges.

It was during one of those when after a long, hard rally Okuhara tapped into the net and Nehwal had celebrated in her face, that the Japanese decided she’d be bullied no more.

Nehwal wasn’t erring on the big smashes yet—the power still fetched her points—but Okuhara had decided to punish her opponent by doubling her retrieving and keeping a relentless supply of those soft drops that made Nehwal stretch her knee for the third straight day. Okuhara’s own defense on the net got confident, and after winning the second at 21-17, she was making the transitions from running to the backcourt to moving to the net seem like child’s play.

Nehwal tried what her tiring body allowed – and she’d hardly achieved any recovery meaning points came only in a bulk and she couldn’t stem the leads from building. She pushed the pace, she tried prolonging the rally, but Okuhara the energizer bunny was in full flow picking everything. “She was everywhere in the third. She’d started picking my good shots by then and even when I tried to push the pace or play longer rallies, nothing worked. She was comfortable,” the Indian would say later.

Trailing 3-8, and finally 7-18, Nehwal had started showing the strain when errors burst out like a dam at the end of long rallies. “When you don’t have an idea of what to do at that stage and the body is tiring, errors creep in,” she would explain. There’s nothing more mortal than a tired smash, and Nehwal’s fine run at the Worlds was ending grimly. While she’s done well to medal a year after she broke her knee, this will go down as an opportunity that slipped away, after doing all the hard work.

“Yes, I didn’t get enough time to recover, and last night I just went and slept and had an early match. It’s surprising, but it was same for both, and I can’t give that as excuse,” she said. She had one last big smash at 10-20, but there wasn’t enough in the tank to challenge Okuhara in the World semis.

Okuhara became the first Japanese in 40 years to make the Worlds finals. “I changed my shots and speed from the second after she was good in the first. I tried to confuse my opponent,” she said, the attempts nicely succeeding. She was to play the winner of PV Sindhu and Chinese Yufei. “People obviously want me to play PV. I have many strategies for different players,” she’d say.