Ashwini Ponnappa and Tanisha Crasto reached their first Super 500 semifinal. (BAI)
When Ashwini Ponnappa and Tanisha Crasto missed two match points to win the Thailand Open quarterfinals in straight games, it felt like they were squandering a chance to reach the semifinals of a Super 500 event for the first time. The first was a result of indecision at the backcourt and the next one was sent into the net. Both mistakes came off the racket of Tanisha Crasto. Then late in the deciding third game, when Lee Yu Lim and Shin Seung Chan went into a 18-16 lead, it was Tanisha making a couple of errors again.
But Tanisha is a fighter. The mistakes can frustrate sometimes, but she rarely shies away from a challenge. And so she stepped up at 19-19. First, came a clever service return winner as she read the angle and pushed the shuttle to the empty corner in the backcourt by changing the racket head direction at the last moment. She let out a big roar.
The service was back with Ashwini and as she had done successfully for most of the match, she went for a long serve. Tanisha was ready, and when the chance came, she rushed to the net to put the Koreans under pressure. Promptly, she killed off the point and went down on her back to celebrate. A 76-minute, 21-15, 21-23, 21-19 win that didn’t come easy against the world No 26 Koreans.
“It’s not easy after losing the second game, mentally you’ll be down and it’s hard to come back from there, but the girls did really well,” coach SR Arun Vishnu told The Indian Express from Bangkok. “They never gave up, even when they were down 8-11 in the third game. The first thing that players at this level need is the heart to fight, strategy comes only after that. You need that fire, that’s what we saw in the third game.”
The unforced errors continue to be a cause of concern for Paris-bound Ash-Tan. They have done remarkably well to qualify for the Olympics ahead of Gayatri Gopichand and Treesa Jolly, but now that the Race to Paris has been run, attention turns to finding areas to improve. That starts with cleaning up their tendency to make errors – ‘we make the same mistakes’ as Arun Vishnu puts it. And improving their court movement and endurance.
The endurance aspect came in handy against the Koreans. After a great start in the opening game, riding mostly on Ashwini’s long serves, the Indians let Shin-Lee back into the match as the Koreans pushed the pace up during rallies and resorted to slowing the pace down between points.
“The instructions at the change of ends was to lift the shuttles higher, we were going a bit too flat before that. They slowed the game down, and Ashwini controlled the game superbly from backcourt, playing a lot of slow drops and half smashes. We should have done that more in the second game, where at times we were blindly hitting,” Arun Vishnu said.
The field is not the strongest in Bangkok but reaching the first Super 500 semifinal as a partnership is a creditable achievement for a pair that has constantly found ways to make things work. Top seeds and local favourites Jongkolphan Kititharakul and Rawinda Prajongjai await them in the semifinal. The two pairs met in Delhi earlier this year at India Open and AshTan came back from a poor start to take the second game and force a decider. That day, they spoke about cutting down the errors and if they manage to keep the Thai pair under pressure for long enough, a win is not out of the question. It will once again be the key as they look for a shot in the arm in their quest to do well in Paris.
Also reaching the semifinals in Bangkok are men’s doubles top seeds Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, who breezed past Malaysia’s Junaidi Arif and Roy King Yap 21-7, 21-14. Chinese Taipei’s Ming Che Lu and Tang Kai Wei await next, and SatChi will be odds on favourites to reach the final. It was however the end of a fine run for Maisnam Meiraba who got a View of what it takes to be at the top, when world champion Kunlavut Vitidsarn outplayed him 21-12, 21-5.
