Playing badminton like ‘it’s a simple game of chess’

HYDERABAD: In the world of high-end sports, doubles badminton occupies a special place. It’s so fast and technical that hand-eye coordination ought to be in perfect harmony with footwork. There’s a reason why Mathias Boe, the coach of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, compares it to fencing. “Watch the footwork of the fencers and you will know why,” he tells this daily at the Pullela Gopichand Academy on Tuesday.

Fencing isn’t the only sport he compares badminton to. In fact, off late, the Dane has asked his primary wards to treat doubles badminton like a ‘simple game of chess’. “It’s worked so far,” says Shetty. It’s hard to argue against this point; Shetty and Rankireddy had the chance to become the World No 1 only a few weeks ago.

The 43-year-old explains. “When you play chess, you don’t like to just do a random move. You make a move because you are hoping your opponent will do that move and you can counter that with a specific move you had in mind. It’s a little bit like a chess game in badminton also. I angle my service this way and my opponents will return the shuttle in this specific way and I can be ready for that.

“From that, it becomes a bit too random. But you have to play a simple game of chess because a lot of the opponents are doing the same thing. So, you need to calculate what they are doing and just need to have the confidence of… ‘f*** everything attitude’ and just do it. But it’s easier to do that in practice than at 17-17 in the third game.”

While the 2012 Olympic silver medallist reckons Rankireddy and Shetty can still improve in this aspect, the latter is intimate when speaking about it. “The thought behind playing the shuttle has actually improved over the years,” he tells this daily after their training session. “The past couple of months, there’s actually a lot more thought that is going on before we actually return the shuttle. We are not just blindly hitting the shuttle. It’s all about ‘what to expect from the opponent after we hit the shuttle.’

“Yes (like a chess move), exactly. We anticipate our opponents’ moves when we actually play. A lot of the times (before) it’s not like we didn’t think before playing a particular stroke but probably now, we think a whole lot more than before. We sort of anticipate what our opponents will play.  We play a certain stroke because we know that this is how our opponents will react to that.”

To play this highly specific way was difficult to begin with but it has become second nature to Shetty. “It’s a process. Initially it’s obviously difficult… we have actually seen the benefits of it. Initially it was tough but we now know that it’s working really well for us.”

Rankireddy, the other half of the partnership, calls Boe ‘a mindmaster’. “He tells that ‘you have to make a chess move’. You have to anticipate it like a game of chess. If you are hitting there, Shet will be there 90% of the time. That worked for us very well over the last few months. Then people started hitting it to the 10% where we don’t expect it so we have to be ready for that as well.”

Having more or less owned the circuit in 2023 — barring a few reverses at the World Championships and the China Open over the last few weeks — they will be one of the favourites to win gold at the Asian Games in Hangzhou. Watch out for the chess games they will indulge in during the course of the tournament.