Day 4
Unfortunately today didn’t go our way. It was always going to be a huge challenge facing the world no.1 in the first round, but obviously that’s sport, sometimes you come up against the toughest competition out there. Ideally this would have happened in a later round with a little rhythm under the belt, but the draw was never in our hands.
The other sure fact in sport is that there always has to be a loser. So the week didn’t go our way result-wise, but from my side, I was happy that Saina felt physically good on the court. After the 5-6 weeks of rehab leading up to this tournament, it’s a small victory to come out of the other side without any aggravation of what has been a chronic string of injuries for Saina stretching back to August 2016. And as I’ve said, the progress she has made from 6 weeks ago can only be a positive leading up to Commonwealth Games.
The game itself was a good one to watch. The first game didn’t start out as well as Saina would have liked, but the second game was very positive. As usual, there are generally a number of factors involved in the overall performance. Having chatted to Saina after the game, she felt her movement was better than it has been, but maybe the fact that we had to focus on rehab, she maybe didn’t get to do enough high intensity training in the build up.
So we’ll take the positives out of the week and move forward with the next goal in mind. Saina was always getting stronger, but now we can work more on speed, agility and conditioning.
Until next time.
