As she inches closer to Indian badminton’s Holy Grail — the All England title — PV Sindhu’s Friday blockbuster with Akane Yamaguchi might be a good time to acknowledge that no one in Indian sport quite triggers the entertaining endorphins as the famous shuttler jamming with one of the Japanese.
There are honour and glory and medals and money that all sport offers, but Sindhu seems to have an unspoken pact with the two Japanese women – Okuhara and Yamaguchi, to take their battles into the realms of last-ball sixes, penalty shootouts, Round 12 KOs or buzzer-beating 3Ps.
Except, Sindhu is a one-person team packing it all in her 1 hour+ (76 mins on Friday) outings against the Nippon nutcrackers.
A loss wouldn’t have altered the classification of this 2021 All England quarterfinal as a classic. But in signalling her return to being one of the game’s grandest contemporary show-women, Sindhu won the titanic clash 16-21, 21-16, 21-19 for good measure.
The usually sedate coach Park Tae Sang was conducting the orchestra of her movements, but often grew animated like an audience mesmerized into his feisty version of ‘Bravo!’
Surjitt Sahani
