Coachless Sindhu goes off rails

Gold Coast: Saina Nehwal is a tough cookie, PV Sindhu is someone who needs to roil herself up to get into a scrap in the court. On the court, it’s often difficult to figure out exactly what’s going wrong with one’s game; it’s here that the a coach in one’s corner works out the solution to a player’s difficulties and suggests tweaks in technique. In the Sindhu-Saina final, there was no coach by the courtside – the two share the same chief coach, P Gopichand, and his assistants. The coaches can’t take sides when the two play, and there was no one to advise Sindhu and Saina.
We asked Sindhu how it felt like being in a match without a coach, and she said she and Saina would have to get used to this. “Yes, at some point we have to get used to it for the times we’d be playing against each other,” she said.
Scrambled minds

Mohammed Siddique, an Indian coach who works closely with P Gopichand, says the absence of a court-side coach can make a significant difference. “We don’t give them any tips when they’re playing against each other,” said Siddique specifically about Saina-Sindhu, and about Indian players in general.
So, Saina and Sindhu are on their own when they take on each other. No-coach at a big final like the CWG can leave a player feeling helpless when he/she falls behind and is unable to find solutions to problems. “When playing such a match, it’s difficult to think individual-wise,” Siddique says. “You’re under the pressure of winning and losing. We sitting outside can judge exactly what’s going on in the middle. For instance, sometimes a player may think ‘OK, my attack is very good, I’m going to go for it’. But you don’t know that the opponent is ready for it. So you need to change your strategy. You need to go for slow drops, half-smashes. That needs to be explained to the player.”
Surer Saina

It’s clear that Saina was surer in her plans and execution; Sindhu’s plans failed to work. Sindhu needed advice more than Saina due to this reason; the other reason Sindhu was the needier of the two is that Saina is more experienced and, by all accounts, tougher.
Sindhu has been a very polite, quiet girl; Gopichand has had to train her to get more aggressive — over the years, Her game needed fixing today, and there was no one in her corner. Maybe, with a coach in her corner, she could have fixed her game and played more like the world No. 3 she is.