These are sobering times for Tanvi Sharma, anointed by Indian badminton fans as the next big thing after Saina Nehwal and PV Sindhu. She was outplayed in the Junior World Championships final, and on Saturday at the Vietnam Open, the 18-year-old lost 21-19, 22-20 to Thai prodigy Saruntong Vitidsarn, sister of former world champion Kunlavut, and Thai Gen Next in her own right after Ratchanok Intanon.

Saruntong is 20, Tanvi two years younger, still green on the seniors circuit, with a game that needs small tweaks and greater physicality, both of which take time.

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What’s raising hackles is that Tanvi led 19-13 and 20-16 in both games and couldn’t convert. She has one of the most stroke-filled games around, but is prone to panicking when closing out, going for the lines or rushing the net-kill, both of which a half-decent opponent will punish.

Saruntong is smarter than your average Super 100 semis opponent.

The only reason her ranking sits at World No. 106 is that the Thais don’t dump expectations on juniors just entering the seniors circuit, forcing them to chase milestone timelines the way Indians map every new player against Saina and Sindhu’s own arcs. Ratchanok was their certified prodigy, perhaps the most skilled shuttler ever, a senior World champion at 17. But anyone who follows the sport seriously knew that was a freak talent, not the norm. Even Saina lost her first Junior World Championships final, before winning it in 2008.

Indians are rushing to project Tanvi as the heir apparent, adding pressure that shows up as poor decisions at the crunch. It doesn’t help that she’s pitted against Unnati Hooda, Anmol Kharb and a cohort of equally hardworking talents, all force-fit into the “India’s No. 2” slot. Tribalism around coaching centres creates bad blood and turns players into chess pieces, entirely avoidable.

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Domestic rivalry is good, but not when it ignores age, experience and a simple truth: unless they’re built as strong as Saina and Sindhu were, India’s new crop of women’s singles will take longer to match those results, even from 19-13 and 20-16 up. Sindhu and Kidambi Srikanth have both had similar meltdowns, well after winning World medals. It stems from tentative fitness, peak fitness being different from simply injury-free, breeding indecision if a coach can’t fix it. But ultimately it’s the player who has to handle the moment. Lakshya Sen has squandered leads at the Olympics too.

Satwik-Chirag have come back from 12-19 down and won. Carolina Marín made a career out of piling on pressure from a losing position. It’s poor badminton literacy to think only Tanvi choked while Saruntong sat twiddling her thumb. Opponents force these moments all the time, and Tanvi will likely inflict the same on someone else in a few years.

Saina, Sindhu and Ratchanok were all physical freaks in their own ways. Tanvi has sublime strokes and overhead deception, and a solid feel for the game, but she isn’t physically strong enough yet to navigate endgames. It isn’t that she’s mentally fragile, she probably isn’t, but in fitness and raw strength she has distance to cover, and that will make her mentally sturdier too.

That endgame funk is hard to pin down. Game immaturity means her rhythm can glitch near the close, points 17 through 21. In a hurry to pocket the set, she hacks at net strokes and goes for lines just to be sure. This is a semi-final; a young mind can leap ahead to the final already. Better endurance would let her get one more shuttle in and wait for the kill instead. Two points can feel like a lot when the mind is muddled about closing out in straight games, and 20-16 carries the same weight, with the added urge to avoid a decider. It’s chaos in the head, a self-fulfilling prophecy for a player labelled an “error merchant.” Easy to forget she won Taiwan on the same fearless strokes, minus the second-guessing.

Tanvi isn’t the first Indian to go through this. Her temperament isn’t really the issue; she’s clearly fading over back-to-back days, which points to a need for stamina training that will take time. She may need a more incisive, clinical coach than Park, though that wasn’t the problem in Vietnam. What she needs, above all, is to get stronger, only so the lovely strokes have robust wheels on court.

Isharani Baruah faces Saruntong in Sunday’s final in Ho Chi Minh City. With 15 Indians in the Top 100, and five of Vietnam’s eight quarter-finalists Indian teenagers, the pressure on Tanvi should, ideally, be lower. But Indian fanbases keep pitting one teenager against another, and the Hyderabad-Bangalore-Guwahati-Unnati fan wars don’t help. Nor does declaring Tanvi “finished” at 18 just because 15-year-old Tanvi Patri is winning International Challenges.

Good popcorn, toxic for the players.

The hurtful losses always come against shuttlers from other countries, Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, China, all surging, while Indians manufacture domestic quagmires instead.