PV Sindhu Goes Down to Tai Tzu-ying’s Poetry, Prose and Panache

The thing about Tai Tzu-ying is that everything she does, no matter what — she could light a match to a car and walk away Vinnie Jones style — she looks elegant and irrevocably apologetic doing it. Her haircut for instance, the undercut, is one popularised by these guys. Look at the way Cillian Murphy wears it and then look at Tai. It's called an undercut, but on her the only thing it undercuts is the menace it’s supposed to inspire. 

Which is not to say she isn’t menacing. 

At some point during the second game of the semifinal against PV Sindhu, when it was clear that this wasn’t going to follow the script, and it was clear that Sindhu wasn’t going to come roaring back, she shifted into a previously unseen gear to win the thing, running away. When it was clear that one of the most sought after moments from this Olympics from an Indian point of view wasn’t actually going to happen, Indian sports twitter unglued a little. It recalibrated. Sindhu has a way of coming back from the most desperate of moments and pulling off the most inspired of victories but this was proving a step too far. Tai Tzu-ying has always proved a step too far.

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The shuttler from Chinese Taipei is 27 years old and plays badminton. That is a bad way to describe what she does but it’s technically accurate. You have to play badminton before you can beautify badminton. She is a kalakar for sure, but a karigar too. 

She plays badminton in a way that no other female player has in the last few years. She wins, she beats you, absolutely annihilates you, via lure and labour. Consider her record against the top female badminton players in the world over the past four years. Against Chen Yufei (the woman she will face in the Tokyo Olympics final) she is 15-3. Against the defending but absent Olympic champion Carolina Marin she is 10-8. Against He Bingjiao (PV Sindhu’s next opponent) she is 8-2. And crucially, against Sindhu she is now 14-5. Her closest rival is Thailand’s Ratchanok Intanon (who she beat in the quarters to take a 15-14 head-to-head lead). It is a ridiculous level of dominance over women who have truly elevated women's badminton over the past half a decade. 

And yet, for large swathes of the first game in the brutal semifinal, Sindhu and Tzu-ying contested earlier today, she seemed absent, trying audacious things when the obvious was perhaps a winner. In the first game she took the lead a mere three times. At 12-12 she took it because of the net cord, and then again at 17-17 it was that little bit of tape that helped her edge over. Both times, she gave that lead up immediately. But when it came to the end game, 18-18 and a game to win, a first Olympic final on the line, Tzu-ying took the lead and never gave it up. That was it. Karigar became kalakar and India’s dream of destiny collapsed.

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It isn’t just that Tzu-ying won, it is that at some moments in the first game it felt like she was doing that thing often considered rude in the animal kingdom. There was a point in time when if Devid Attenborough’s voice had crept into the feed rather than the commentary it may have seemed more appropriate. And here we see the predator playing with the prey.   

Which isn’t to say this was as one sided as it looks. Well maybe it was, but that happened in the second game when Tzu-ying took the lead at 4-4 and then put the boosters on: backhand drop shots, down the lines, cross court lobs and that faked overhead drop shot (there is someone somewhere currently composing a sonnet on that one simple thing) flowing freely. Sindhu’s game was reliant on aggression, on power from the back of the court capitalised by her reach, but against unpredictability everyone is at sea. And then of course there was that Tai Tzu-ying backhand, a no look back to the net shot that is as audacious as it is mesmerising. If you aren’t convinced about its brilliance, try this at home. 

Line up against a wall. On the count of three turn around and start lunging the other way. Mid lunge, take your preferred hand, cross it over your chest, and whip out a backhand. Pause at the point where you would technically strike the shuttle and observe the direction of your knuckles. If they are facing away from you, you are not Tzu-ying. You, padawan Joe, don’t have what it takes. Your shot will sail out. Tzu-ying’s rarely does. She plays that shot like it is an evening at Siri fort and bhai aaj kaam bohot boring tha, let's have a good knockabout what say Pusarla? Thoda fitness bhi ho jayega. Except she does this all the time, no matter the scale of the moment. And does it against world class professionals no less. 

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And while PV Sindhu has sailed out of the Tzu-ying storm defeated, the truth is that this game does more than any other to elevate Sindhu into that rare and exclusive pantheon of Indian sportspersons — those who turn up when the stage is big and the lights are bright. There is a very popular joke told often by Pakistani cricket journalists to their Indian counterparts. What are the two stars on India’s jersey for? For the two World Cups they’ve won is the prompt reply. No, you idiots they then chime, it’s for the two games Sachin Tendulkar won you. Which is to say, the Pakistanis don’t think much of the GOAT. When you ask about big game players, they say Javed Miandad.

Over the past five years, Tai Tzu-ying has been the dominant force of women’s badminton. She has won 13 titles (Two All Englands, An Asian Games gold and a World Tour Finals the highlights). In the same period, Sindhu has won two titles. Except, Sindhu has won the World Championships and the World Tour Finals in 2018. Cometh the hour, and Sindhu evidently turns up. She was pushed in her quarterfinal by Akane Yamaguchi but raised her level enough to get through with relative ease. In her two Olympic appearances, she has dropped exactly four games. And while there is perhaps no one more deserving of contesting an Olympic final (purely on the Olympic cycle merit system) than Tzu-ying, Sindhu still has a chance to do something no Indian woman has ever done before an Olympics — double up. 

Where that achievement (for journalistic purposes we will not assume the result is done and dusted) will put her on the honours board of Indian Olympians can be thought about later. For now, there is a bronze medal to be won. And if there’s one thing we’ve confirmed this July, it’s this — if you want things done for this country, best leave it to the women. 

And if you aren’t quite sold on what badminton is and don’t want to watch Lin Dan videos, then grab your critical backside and tune in for the women’s final. Tai Tzu-ying will change your mind.

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