‘We have long way to go in terms of producing doubles pair’: Ashwini Ponnappa

It all started from Rio 2016. India has been winning laurels in global level and scaling heights since then. Especially in the singles category by PV Sindhu, Saina Nehwal, Kidambi Srikanth, B Sai Praneeth and HS Prannoy. However, the doubles category has been maintaining dignified silence. In the recent past, we haven’t heard of any news from doubles since Sikki Reddy and Pranaav Jerry Chopra's win in the mixed doubles event at the 2017 Syed Modi International Grand Prix Gold competition in January. Later, in Australia Open it was doubles show from Indian team, yet, lost to proceed to the further rounds.

Doubles ace shuttler, Ashwini Ponnappa believes that the training and the support system given to the doubles are not matching in anyway with the training given to the singles.

Ashwini explained that the consistency is lacking between doubles and singles. She said that though there is lot of potential in the Indian double players, yet players are far behind other country’s players.

She said,

Ashwini’s mixed doubles partner Sikki Reddy also stated that Indian doubles players are lacking with the encouragement. Singles coach, Pullela Gopichand also was concerned regarding this matter. Malaysia’s Tan Kim Her, doubles coach, had been invited. Since then, there is a proper system and schedule in place that is helping doubles shuttlers to improve and focus on specific drills.

“Tan Kim Her is a good coach. He pushes the players and works on doubles skills. The players definitely benefit from having an international doubles specialist,” said Ashwini.

After having been paired up in last November, N. Sikki Reddy and Ashwini Ponnappa had improved a lot, raising from 110th position to 25th position among world rankings in mixed doubles. “Sikki and I play very differently from what Jwala (Gutta) and I used to play. We rotate a lot with her moving at the back at times and me moving into the net. We had to work on our rotation as it was new to us, but we've slowly gotten there,” said Ashwini.

However, when asked about why the pair have lost a lot of close matches despite dominating majority of the games in recent times, Ashwini replied: “The missing element would be patience. We need to be more patient and not get hurry up to get points, especially when we are leading.”

Prior to the World Championships in August, Ashwini hopes to be injury-free. "It's important that I train smart and train right. That for me is to be able to play my best on the court and play a strong game, without worrying about any injury," she concluded.