With first international final, Shreyanshi Pardeshi taking giant strides

A few strokes later, Pardeshi unleashed the most deceptive of drop shots – identical to the one Chua had tried on her moments ago. Chua dived. She didn’t reach. Score – 2-1 to Pardeshi in the second game, she had already won the first. She would win the second and third as well to move into the final of the five-setter Tata Open International Challenge in Mumbai – her first international final. Ask her about that particular point and she will shrug.

“The only thing in my head was to get the shuttle back to the other side, no matter what,” she says, smiling. It didn’t matter to her that her opponent was taller, stronger, and ranked 311 places better than her own 410 world ranking.

For all she cared, Chua could throw in her smashes with as much venom as she could muster, or disguise the most delicate of drop shots. Pardeshi is a retriever. Whatever Chua would hit, somehow, the Indian would be there to get it back over the net. In a match that lasted 33 minutes, Chua would hit only one shot that Pardeshi could not reach.

It’s a defensive tactic that is designed more through necessity however. Of all the players competing at the Mumbai-based event, Pardeshi is the only one to stand shorter than the net itself. “I’m five-foot-half-inch,” she says, adding special emphasis on the half-inch. The vertical shortage proves a technical disadvantage. “Because of her height, she cannot generate enough power required to hit a point-winning smash,” mentions her coach Anil Kumar Nagam, from the Gopichand Academy where she trains. “She can get to that stage, but she will need a lot of strength training and time. For now though, she’s adept at the retrieving game,” he adds.

Through a strict fitness regime, she has managed to enforce the strategy. “One advantage of her height is that she can bend low to reach the shuttle-cock. But she’d have to have the legs to get there,” says Nagam.

Fitness would always be the key, and she knows it. She asserts that she isn’t particularly fond of ‘Gopi Sir’s fitness runs,’ but needs to go through the gruelling process.

Twice a week, the cadets at the famed badminton coach’s academy in Hyderabad are made to run a series of laps on an athletics track. “He’s set a one-minute-15-second deadline for each lap. If you don’t complete it in that time, then you run extra. So I make sure I cross that mark,” she says, adding that she has a 1:11 record. Still, running on court to retrieve shots will only help you to a certain extent. For the rest she relies on her ability to anticipate. “I notice particular shots and areas the opponent likes to hit, so I have it in my head that she might want to hit in that area again,” she explains.

“Also, I’m hitting shots to a certain area of the court where I know she can only return in a limited area. So I can anticipate her shots,” she adds. More often than not in the semi-final, Pardeshi was indeed standing exactly where she was supposed to be.

Born and brought up in Indore, the class 12 student always had a diminutive frame. It’s one that would hinder her from being allowed to play the sport with her neighbours during her childhood. “I was always too small. So they wouldn’t let me play. So I’d wait for my father to return home from work and then we’d play. Sometimes it was at 11 at night,” she recalls.

Months after starting, she competed at a district level tournament, and won. She remembers deciding about her badminton future on her way home from the event. “My dad was riding the motorcycle and my mother was pillion and I was in her lap, holding onto the trophy. I think I had dozed off, but that’s when I thought of becoming a badminton player,” she recalls.

Eventually, in 2011, she would successfully try-out for a spot in the Gopichand Academy during a selection campaign at Indore.

A shift to Hyderabad was in order – a move she was looking forward to, hoping to get a few glimpses of her idol Saina Nehwal. Her playing style though, is modelled more around the Japanese. “A lot of them like Nozomi Okuhara and Akane Yamaguchi are short like me and they play a retrieving game,” she says. Both Okuhara and Yamaguchi, ranked four and nine in the world respectively, incidentally stand at 5-foot-1.

The opening rally against Chua lasted 23 shots. The ones that followed were somewhat shorter – an average of around the 15 stroke mark.