French Open badminton: Kidambi Srikanth turns around familiar script to notch impressive win after squandering match point
Kidambi Srikanth logged in his usual nightmare shift. But it’s how he woke up from the bad dream — at the 19-point mark when he invariably implodes despite leading — that proved to be a glitch in the doom-script predicted for him.The banshees were screaming that another ‘loss’ was loading when he frittered away a match point in Game 2. But Srikanth woke up from that routine stutter at the 19-point mark, as if all he had to do was brush his teeth, grin at the mirror, and tuck into the gritty Chou Tien Chen’s high-fibre game.
His court-side folk will insist – “It’s only the first round, it’s nothing. He needs to play at a good level tomorrow.” But Srikanth’s 21-15, 20-22, 21-8 win over Chou Tien Chen at the French Open will remain a happy story until the next time he grabs a loss from the...