Ayush Shetty has been given homework. Not a drill, not a video breakdown, but a sentence, to be written down and looked at daily: “17th August is a bad day for Shi Yuqi.”
“That’s what I told him,” Vimal Kumar, co-founder of the Centre for Badminton Excellence in Bengaluru, told India Today.
“Just write it there. Just look at it every day.”
It is a small, almost superstitious act of manifestation, but it sits on a foundation Vimal genuinely believes in. Ayush opens his BWF World Championships campaign at the Indira Gandhi Indoor Stadium on Monday against Shi, the defending champion, world number one, and a man who has already beaten the 21-year-old Indian twice this year.
“What I’m really looking forward to on the 17th is if Ayush can beat Shi, that will be huge,” Vimal said.
“And there’s a good possibility, and it’s a 50-50 game, and so I’m looking forward to watching those matches and just see how it shapes up. We’ve had some good discussions on it.”
National chief coach Pullela Gopichand sees the draw in similarly nuanced terms. Speaking ahead of the tournament, the veteran coach acknowledged the difficulty of Ayush’s assignment while pointing to precedent.
“It’s a tough draw on the face of it. Shi Yuqi in the first round is better than him in the later round,” Gopichand said.
“I think Lakshya beat him at the All England in a very similar set-up. With his big smash, I think Ayush is definitely going to be quite a threat. I do believe he has a very good chance.”
The comparison holds up. Lakshya Sen beat Shi 23-21, 19-21, 21-17 in the opening round of the All England Open in March, an hour and eighteen minutes that ended a run of four straight defeats to the Chinese star, and did so by refusing to let an early setback rattle him, closing out the decider from 11-11. It is exactly the kind of composure Vimal wants to see from Ayush on Monday, and exactly the kind of upset Gopichand believes an early-round draw against a big name can sometimes produce, before the occasion and the reputation have had time to properly settle on an opponent.
‘AYUSH WAS’NT ALLOWED TO PLAY’
The record between Ayush and Shi reads 0-3. But context, as Vimal frames it, tells a more competitive story. In January, at the Malaysia Open, Ayush pushed the world number one to three games, leading 16-13 in the opener before Shi wrestled it away 18-21, then watching Ayush level things up 21-18, before the Chinese star closed it out 21-12 in the decider. It was, at the time, the closest anyone had taken Shi all season.
April told a different story. In the final of the Asian Championships in Ningbo, on home turf and in front of a partisan crowd, Shi dismantled Ayush 21-8, 21-10 in 42 minutes. In that final, Shi had denied Ayush any rhythm at all, keeping the shuttle fractionally off the Indian’s ideal hitting zone and choking off the steep smashes and net tumbles that are his stock-in-trade.
Vimal put it more bluntly on Friday.
“The last time, when he played at the Asian Championships, Shi Yuqi tactically destroyed him, never allowed him — it’s not that Ayush played bad or anything, but he was never allowed to play.”
That distinction, between playing badly and simply never being allowed to play, is the one Vimal keeps returning to. It is also, he suggests, fixable. Since April, Ayush has been working on exactly the deficiencies that final exposed: shot variation, rally construction, the discipline to build a point rather than force it, with Irwansyah Adi Pratama, the Indonesian coach who also guides PV Sindhu, now shaping his day-to-day game at the Centre.
Ayush idolises Viktor Axelsen for a reason, a fellow giant who took years to convert raw power into a complete, patient game. At 6ft 4in, Ayush has the smash. What Vimal, overseeing the Centre’s broader operations, wants from him now is the restraint to use it at the right moment rather than every moment.
Gopichand’s reading circles the same space from a different angle. His point about the big smash being a threat is not a throwaway compliment; it is the tool that makes Ayush dangerous even against a player who has already worked out how to blunt it once. A dangerous smash forces an opponent to respect it, and respect buys the space in which everything else, the variation, the patience, the rally construction his coaches have been drilling, can begin to operate.
A NIGGLE, DIP IN FORM BEFORE WORLDS
There has also been a body to manage.
“He had a little bit of an issue with his forearm, a couple of, about 40-45 days back when he was playing in the Far Eastern tournament,” Vimal revealed.
“But he has fully recovered.”
The timing, if imperfect, may still favour Ayush. Since beating Ayush in Ningbo, Shi’s form has dipped in ways that would have seemed unthinkable in April. He has been knocked out in the quarter-finals of two straight tournaments, the Singapore Open, where Indonesia’s Alwi Farhan beat him in three games, the Japan Open, where he fell to Frenchman Toma Junior Popov, and the China Open on home soil, where Chou Tien Chen ended a nine-match losing streak against him. He also withdrew before his Thailand Open semi-final in May. For a player who won the Asian Championships and looked untouchable doing it, that is a curious stretch of results to be carrying into the World Championships.
Ayush’s own build-up has had its bumps. Since the high of Ningbo, early exits have followed him around the tour, though a run to the Round of 16 at the China Open in July, where he beat world number 11 Alwi Farhan in three games before a tight three-game loss to Ireland’s Nhat Nguyen, has given him two clear weeks to peak for New Delhi.
“He’s beaten all the best players in the world,” Vimal said. “He’s beaten all the best players, but again, you have to play, you have to mature quickly.”
Maturity, on Monday, will be measured in the smallest margins: a smash that finds the line rather than the tramlines, a rally allowed to build rather than rushed. Gopichand believes he has a very good chance. Vimal has him writing it on a mirror. Ayush is currently ranked 22 in the world, Shi is top of it. On paper, that’s a lot; on paper, then again, is not where either coach wants this settled.
– Ends
