TANVI ONE HIT AWAY FROM MATCHING SAINA

TANVI Sharma was involved in a brutal match on Friday. It was a match filled with chaos. With a junior World Championships medal on the line, she was flirting with danger on numerous occasions. She had expended every ounce of her energy to pull off a victory, a win that put her name in the history books —first Indian woman shuttler to medal at the BWF World Junior Championships after a gap of 17 years.

- ANMOL GURUNG @Guwahati

Less than 24 hours later, Tanvi returned to the arena a different beast. No chaos, no drama. It was almost near-flawless. The 16-year-old, who’s chasing gold medal, marched into the finals of the highly-coveted meet at the National Centre of Excellence, here on Saturday. As her coach, Park Tae-sang, would later reveal, Tanvi was confident from the word go. “Today (Saturday), after entering the court, she warmed up and she was looking at me and saying, ‘coach, I have confidence today.’ With the noise level hitting thousand decibel, Tanvi was in the zone, operating like a well-oiled machine. Si Ya Liu of China was r