Take a bow, H.S. Prannoy

H.S. Prannoy (Image source: Twitter.com/Media_SAI)

Two years back, the 32-year-old from Thiruvananthapuram was struggling to find a way forward in a stalled badminton career. He had had an ankle injury, debilitating fatigue brought on by Covid, no sponsors and no money. He had put up a social media post asking for help to get him to the 2021 BWF World Championships. He had exited marquee tournaments—like the All England and the Swiss Open—early on in the season, deepening his troubles. A last gasp sponsor had ensured that he could compete at the worlds.

“I will play until the money runs out,” he had told reporters back then, a sense of hopelessness and weariness creeping into his voice.

Now he’s beaten, in two successive days, home favourite and two-time world champion Kento Momota, and the Commonwealth Games champion and All England finalist Lakshya Sen, whose sensational rise had marked him out to be the one to beat at the 2022 BWF World Championships in Tokyo.

Now it’s Prannoy who is the only Indian standing in the singles game at the worlds. It’s a pity that the two most promising Indian singles players—Sen and Prannoy—had to clash so early on in the tournament. But it also presents for Prannoy the opportunity of his career—to finally step out of the shadows of his compatriots and become the player he has always shown he could be.

Prannoy is a “giant killer”. There’s a tricky message in that phrase. It says, here’s a person who can, and has, defeated the world’s best. It also implies that the person is not a “giant” in his or her own right. So, while Prannoy has, at different points in his career, beaten legends—everyone from Lee Chong Wei to Lin Dan, via current world champion Loh Kean Yew and Olympic champion Viktor Axelsen—he has never managed to string those incredible performances into a pattern consistent enough to get him the big titles.

Over the course of his career, Prannoy has seen P. Kashyap overshadow him as India’s most promising male singles player, then Kidambi Srikanth took that mantle, and now it’s the young Sen.

But this season, including at the ongoing world championship, Prannoy has come across as a person transformed. Not only has his game become sharper, more skillful, more thoughtful and less dependent on his ability to aggressively smash away, as a person, Prannoy has never looked calmer, more nerveless.

This was evident in India’s history-making Thomas Cup campaign earlier this year, where Prannoy won a must-win match in the quarter-finals to put India into the semis, and then repeated the feat in the semis to take India to their first ever Thomas Cup final and eventually, the title—all the while nursing a foot injury.

It is evident again at the world championship where he outplayed Momota, matching skill with skill, and working the angles without losing patience. When Momota picked up a forehand smashed down the line, Prannoy did not panic that a winning shot had been returned. Instead, he was anticipating it, and dispatched the return calmly with a wristy backhand shot across the court that left the Japanese floundering. Of course, Momota is not back to his best, still on the comeback trail after a traffic accident in 2020. Yet, Momota is nearly there, and Prannoy dictated terms in a way that shows a new, confident winning mentality.

He made Momota, against whom he has lost all seven of their previous encounters, do all the running: deposited gently feathered drop shots at the net at will, and when Momota retrieved, Prannoy would send the shuttle soaring back and across the court. Prannoy played in combinations a superbly skilled boxer would be proud of, and instead of running out of steam after a big win like he used to do before, he repeated that against his teammate Sen in today’s match: a drop shot, a lifted shuttle back and across, then a cross court forehand, then a drop shot again, a down-the-line smash, a backhand push angled in the other direction, a sleight-of-hand pick-up, backhanded, late, sent flicked across the court…

Sen matched it for most of the match, but Prannoy held his nerve just a little bit better, made that call between patience and aggression just a tiny bit better—nearly intangible things that make all the difference.

Yes, it’s a pity that these two fine players had to play each other early on, but the Sen-Prannoy encounter is a sign of wonderful things to come for Indian badminton. Having one world-dominating player like P.V. Sindhu is fantastic, but having a lot of players who are at the top of their game is the absolute ideal. With the brand new men’s doubles pair of M.R. Arjun and Dhruv Kapila making the quarterfinals, along with the more established and massively promising pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty reaching the same stage on the day Prannoy also put himself in the quarters is a brilliant day for Indian badminton. Whether all of these players will finally win medals is one thing, but it’s already cause for quiet pride that India’s badminton ecosystem is thriving more than ever.