All England Open : Kidambi Srikanth terms new service rule 'ridiculous' after too many faults
Kidambi Srikanth slammed the chair officials after being called for a series of “ridiculous” service faults in his shock loss in the pre-quarterfinals at the All England Championship. He also said that BWF should have had the courtesy to get feedback from players and coaches before the tournament.
World No. 3, Srikanth suffered a shock defeat to the unseeded Chinese 11-21, 21-15, 20-22 at the Arena Birmingham in a 52-minute battle on Thursday night to crash out of the tournament. The Indian expressed his disappointment and compared his previous game and the one he lost. He said that he didn’t expect so many service faults in the opening game.
“There were too many service faults in the opening game. I didn’t expect that to happen. Yesterday I didn’t get even one, today it was totally changed. That should not happen in a tournament. There should be a specific rule. The umpire couldn’t find faults yesterday but today the umpire sitting there found too many faults. It is ridiculous,” Srikanth said after the match, as quoted by Scroll.
India's rising doubles pair of Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty too were on the cusp of pulling off an upset win over second-seeded Danish combo of Mathias Boe and Carsten Mogensen but a few service faults at crucial moments saw them lose 16-21, 21-16, 21-23 in an hour and three minutes.
"It was unfortunate that we got faulted every 2-3 points
The Badminton World Federation (BWF) is trying out a fixed service rule in all top tournaments from March this year. According to the law, "The whole shuttle shall be below 1.15
It was first introduced at the German Open early this month and was criticised by India’s N Sikki Reddy. She posted a video on Twitter of the controversial calls made by the service judge using the new rule.
“This is how BWF and service judges have been playing with our career. Looks like they don’t really care about our years of struggle and hard work to achieve our goals. (Not even 1 out of 100 will agree that these are fault serves),” Sikki tweeted after she and her mixed doubles partner Pranaav Chopra lost in the pre-quarterfinals.
Clear picture of my service with shuttle contact which is not a fault and this has been called fault during crucial times. This is not the first time happening😓😓😓 @bwfmedia do something please 🙏 pic.twitter.com/3Kn6lIACki
— sikkireddy (@sikkireddy) March 10, 2018
The service rule has also been lambasted by all top players, including PV Sindhu, Lin Dan, Lee Chong Wei, Viktor Axelsen and prominent coaches such as India's P Gopichand and Denmark's Kenneth Jonassen, who described it "discriminating against tall players".
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