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Liliyana’s retirement leaves uphill challenge

Final days: Indonesian mixed doubles pair Tontowi Ahmad (left) and Liliyana Natsir return the shuttle cock during a match against Hafiz Faisal and Gloria Emanuelle Widjaja on Thursday

Ramadani Saputra (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Fri, January 25, 2019

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Liliyana’s retirement leaves uphill challenge

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span class="inline inline-center">Final days: Indonesian mixed doubles pair Tontowi Ahmad (left) and Liliyana Natsir return the shuttle cock during a match against Hafiz Faisal and Gloria Emanuelle Widjaja on Thursday. The pair progressed to the quarterfinals and is set to face Takuro Hoki and Wakana Nagahara of Japan on Friday.(JP/Seto Wardhana)

The Indonesian mixed doubles category is entering a crucial phase as it has not yet found any stand-out players who can match the strength of Liliyana “Butet” Natsir and Debby Susanto following their retirement.

Liliyana and Debby decided to hang up their rackets for good after the 2019 Daihatsu Indonesia Masters. Debby, who competes alongside Ronald in the tournament, bid goodbye earlier as she bowed to the Dutch pair Mark Lamsfuss and Isabel Herttrich in Tuesday’s first round.

Meanwhile, Liliyana is still on the right track to end her badminton journey with a sweet victory in front of the home crowds, after progressing to the quarterfinals with her partner Tontowi Ahmad. They crushed their juniors Hafiz Faisal and Gloria Emanuelle Widjaja 21-16 and 21-12 on Thursday in a match in which the juniors easily lost every point, most likely because of massive pressure applied by the Olympic Rio gold medalists

Thursday’s round has proven that once again the country’s mixed doubles category put the burden on Liliyana and Tontowi to reach the podium. Two other of the country’s hopefuls, Praveen Jordan and Melati Daeva Oktavianti, still struggled to minimize their unforced errors when they bowed down to the first seed Zheng Siwei and Huang Yaqiong in the second round. The Indonesian pair lost 21-16 and 21-12.

This circumstance is a wake-up call for the category as the juniors seemed unready to take up the torch from Liliyana after she concluded her career this week. Mixed doubles category coach Nova Widianto admitted that it would not be easy for his category to continue the stellar achievements that had been made by Tontowi and Liliyana after the latter withdraws from the badminton world.

“This transition phase will not be easy. With Liliyana and Debby retiring, it would be heavy task,” he told journalists.

Talking about the next target after Liliyana’s retirement, Nova, who won two World Championships with Liliyana in 2005 and 2007, said his category aimed to compete at this year’s World Championship.

He said the juniors, especially the women’s players in the category, should make extra efforts to improve their performance as now they were the one who are burdened with need to score achievements.

“There must be challenges during this transition phase. I also experienced that when I had to take up the torch from Trikus Harjanto and Minarti Timur after they retired,” he said referring to the silver medalist pair in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

“Titles would be hard to grab during the first year, but I hope it would not take more than one year [for us] to continue what we have achieved now,” he added.

Liliyana, who is to face the Japanese pair Takuro Hoki and Wakana Nagahara in the quarterfinals on Friday, had put a lot of hope on her juniors to continue Indonesia’s reign over the mixed doubles category, saying that her juniors must maintain consistency in their performance.

“They should train harder to improve their performance as there is still time to improve before the [Tokyo] Olympics,” she said.

After being left by Liliyana, Nova said he would try to pair up Tontowi with the junior Winny Oktavina Kandow until the middle of this year. If the new combination did not show progress, he said he would try to match Tontowi with another player.

On the other side of the court, women’s doubles Greysia Polii and Apriani Rahayu secured a quarterfinals spot after beating Taiwanese pair Hsu Ya Ching and Hu Ling Fang.

Indonesia sent two men’s singles players to the quarterfinals after Anthony Sinisuka Ginting and Jonatan Christie beat their Chinese opponents Zhao Junpeng and Shi Yuqi, respectively.

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