At 14-19 down in the third game, Lakshya Sen was two points from another defeat. The score was uncomfortable, but the setting was even more so. India were playing Japan in the Asian Games men’s team quarter-final, and Lakshya had been given the job of opening the tie against Kodai Naraoka, a familiar opponent who has had his number since their junior days.
For a while now, “Which Lakshya will turn up today?” has become something of a running joke on badminton Twitter, a shorthand for the curious unpredictability of a player capable of extraordinary highs and baffling lows. In Japan, with the noise around him at its loudest, Lakshya offered a rather compelling answer.
For much of the evening at Ichinomiya City Municipal Gymnasium, he had looked like a player trying to solve a puzzle. The drift in the hall made life difficult from one end, Naraoka was happy to extend rallies and Lakshya had lost the first game 11-21. Lakshya recovered spectacularly in the second, winning it 21-5 while playing from the better side of the court, only to find himself behind again in the decider.
At 14-19, almost imperceptibly, something shifted.
Lakshya stopped giving away the easy points. He defended, retrieved and waited. Naraoka began to feel the pressure. The Indian won seven straight points to complete a comeback that had looked improbable a few minutes earlier.
When Naraoka’s final shot found the net, the Indian bench erupted. HS Prannoy and the rest of the team punched the air in delight, but Lakshya simply stood in the middle of the court, soaking it in. He shook Naraoka’s hand, then walked over to the coaching box and embraced the Indian coaches. There was no roar or fist pump, just the quiet relief of a player who had finally found his way out.
THE FIRE RETURNS
From Bengaluru, Vimal Kumar was watching closely. He has seen enough of Lakshya over the years to know that the numbers alone do not always tell the story.
“I was basically pleased with how the first match turned out for Lakshya,” Vimal told IndiaToday.in.
“From 19-14 when Kodai was up, Lakshya played something very special. When I talked to him, I said the main thing was that he did not make a single mistake. Normally, with the unforced errors he was giving, he didn’t make one mistake.”
Vimal had been waiting to see this side of Lakshya again.
“I could see some fire in him after some time, which was very nice to see.”
“In a team championship, when you do that, it’s good as a leader,” he said. “He is the top player in the country, and he set an example.”
It is worth remembering that Lakshya has set that kind of example before. He was part of the side that won India’s first Thomas Cup gold in Bangkok in 2022, and a year later he helped push the men’s team to a 2-0 lead in the Hangzhou Asian Games final before China clawed their way back to steal the gold. In Paris in 2024, at 22, he became the first Indian men’s singles player to reach an Olympic semi-final, then winning the first game of the bronze medal match against Lee Zii Jia only to fade across the following two.
These were not the results of a player short on ability. They were reminders of how high his ceiling runs, which is what has made the last few months so hard to watch for the people around him.
WHEN QUESTIONS GREW
Lakshya did not arrive at the Asian Games carrying the easy confidence of an athlete in the middle of a purple patch. The months after his run to the All England final had been difficult. The World Championships in Delhi, in particular, had turned into an evening of uncomfortable questions.
He had arrived at his home World Championships as the 14th seed. He left the tournament in the second round after losing to American Garrett Tan, then ranked No. 92 in the world. The defeat was not simply an upset on paper. Lakshya had been ahead in the contest, but Tan recovered to win 19-21, 21-19, 21-17, and there were passages in which the Indian appeared reluctant to take control.
Vimal did not soften his assessment afterwards.
“Lakshya lost to a very ordinary player, and there is no excuse for this performance,” he had said.
He criticised Lakshya for being too passive, for failing to get underneath the shuttle and for allowing Tan to dictate the rallies. It was a harsh assessment, but it was not the verdict of someone who had stopped believing in the player.
Quite the opposite.
“When I see him lose without fighting, that really hurts and you feel bad because I don’t want him to go to waste,” Vimal said in a later conversation. “He is a player who can do a lot better.”
That has become one of the strange features of Lakshya’s career. The peaks are high enough to make the valleys feel deeper.
At the All England earlier this year, he looked like a player who had found a different rhythm. He beat world No. 1 Shi Yuqi, overcame Li Shi-feng and reached the final, where he lost to Lin Chun-yi. More significant than the result was the way Lakshya spoke about it. He talked about keeping things mentally simple, accepting victories and defeats and learning not to treat every tournament as though it carried the same weight.
The run seemed to offer evidence of a more settled player. The months that followed complicated that picture.
The World Championships exit was followed by another early defeat at the China Masters. A player who had spent the first part of the year looking capable of making a deep run at the biggest tournaments was again searching for consistency.
‘DON’T FORGET THE PROCESS’
There is a tendency, when an elite athlete’s results fluctuate, to reduce the explanation to one word. With Lakshya, that word has often been “mental”.
The reality is more complicated.
He has been working with Morn Brockman, a mental conditioning coach, for around a year. Lakshya has spoken about learning to separate his identity from the result of an individual match, and about understanding that a long season contains both victories and defeats.
When Brockman spoke to The Times of India last year, he described Lakshya as a “high-arousal athlete”, someone who thrives on energy and intensity.
The task, then, was not to take the emotion out of his game. Brockman compared him to Rafael Nadal and Virat Kohli, athletes who have learned to make that intensity work for them.
Vimal believes Lakshya still needs to spend considerable time on that part of his game.
“Sometimes it is not that they do it purposely, but they need to address what that issue is. You cannot just go down meekly like that. The issues need to be addressed,” he said.
“Sometimes you need to sacrifice your badminton a little bit and devote a little more time towards these factors to find ways to deal with them.”
The demands of the men’s singles circuit make that work even more important. There is little comfort in a ranking when the field is so deep. Vimal’s point is that players around the top 30 can spring surprises on one another, making consistency especially difficult.
“Badminton is not like cricket,” Vimal said.
“So many good players are around, and unlike cricket where you play every three or four months, here you play week-in and week-out. When you lose continuously, it can really affect you, so players need to find ways to deal with it.”
That is also why Vimal does not want Lakshya to treat the mental side of his game as something to revisit only after a poor run.
“It is a process you cannot forget,” Vimal said.
“Just because you win a few good matches or did well in the last All England, you cannot afford to neglect it. You have to give equal importance to working on your mind as you give to your technical and physical aspects.”
That is perhaps why the comeback against Naraoka felt significant.
It was not simply that Lakshya had beaten the world No. 7. He had done so after being in precisely the sort of situation that had caused concern in Delhi. He had been behind, the match was slipping away and the opponent had control. There was no guarantee that the next point would change anything.
Lakshya simply kept playing.
There is a temptation now to call this the moment Lakshya is back. It would be premature. His career has never offered such easy conclusions, and one great comeback cannot erase the months that came before it.
But sport is often less about erasing what happened than responding to it.
At 14-19, he had a choice that elite sport presents in different forms all the time. He could let the previous few weeks, the expectations and the scoreboard become part of the next point.
Or he could play the next point. He chose the latter seven times in a row.
For a player who has spent much of his career moving between extraordinary highs and frustrating lows, perhaps this was less about making a statement and more about finding himself again.
The questions will return, as they always do. So will the difficult days. But in Japan, when the noise was loudest and the scoreline was against him, Lakshya found the fight to stay in the moment. The fire was there. This time, he knew what to do with it.
– Ends
