The Yonex Sunrise Hong Kong Super Series 2008 has just wrapped up. Nothing notable except for the fact that I managed to get some tickets to watch the game live last Friday!
One of my friends is a really eager badminton fan and he was able to get 4 really good tickets for Friday night. Seeing as I had nothing else to do, I jumped at the opportunity to go along.
The games on Friday night were generally around the quarter final stage which is a good time to start watching live. Basically, at this stage, some of the not so good players have already been knocked out and the players aren't too tired yet. This means that you see lots of good players playing at the top of their game - that's the theory anyway. I don't know if the theory worked in this particular case, but the badminton on show was definitely impressive.
I was especially lucky in that the Friday night games included both Lin Dan and Taufik Hidayat - both of whom are fantastic players (in fact, you may recall that Lin Dan won the Olympic gold medal!).
Our seats were right behind court 2 so we managed to get a fantastic view of Hidayat playing singles (unfortunately, Lin Dan was on court 1 so we didn't get as good a view). I've seen a lot of good players playing badminton over the years but nothing compares to watching top professionals play - in particular, how effortless they make it seem. Two shots in particular from Hidayat stand out in my memory.
One of them was a backhand cross court smash from the middle of the court. Even in the stands, you could hear the crisp "pok" as he connected. What I couldn't believe though was how he managed to hit a powerful smash using his backhand (which was even more powerful than my best forehand smash!!). My mind boggles in trying to figure out how his hand and arm could do it.
The other shot was a straight forehand smash. At the time, Hidayat was on the far side of the court and facing our seats. Wong (his opponent) only managed a clearance to the middle of the court and you could see Hidayat preparing to smash it back (sure enough, Hidayat smacks the ball - boy oh boy, did he smack it!). From my point of view, I heard the "wallop" as he hit the shuttle - the next thing I know, the shuttle is already on the ground and Hidayat has won the point!
According to wikipedia, Hidayat holds the record for the fastest smash in singles play of 305 km/h (189 mph) and I can't help but wonder how close he got to repeating that (or maybe even beating it) on Friday!
All in all, an awesome night out which was only spoiled by one event at the end of the night (but I'll leave that for another post).
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2 comments:
Nice. Sometimes watch it on TV. The speed and reflexes needed were what attracted me to the game in the first place.
Haven't played now in many years. Would be REAL ugly trying to lumber around the court nowadays I reckon!
I've seen videos of badminton occasionally as well. I have to say that watching it on TV doesn't compare to watching badminton live.
Somehow, on TV, the game seems a lot slower. You regularly see shots which win points and you think "How come he didn't get that?".
Watching it in real life, you get a much better feel for how fast the shuttle is going.
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