Sindhu’s fight is back, but finish remains a concern Today Sports News

For elite athletes returning from injury, the first real marker of readiness is rarely a result. It is movement without restraint, and the body responding before the mind has time to doubt. P.V. Sindhu described that feeling after the Malaysia Open.

“Coming back after injury, you wait for that one feeling… the body moving freely, the legs responding, the game flowing again. This week, I felt it again,” Sindhu wrote in an Instagram post.

Sindhu, who was forced to take a break after suffering a foot injury in October, returned to action at the Malaysia Open — the first tournament (Super 1000) of the season. Her run ended with a semifinal defeat but mattered for reasons more fundamental than the scoreline. “A tough semifinal loss… but moving without hesitation. Trusting myself again. Feeling the fight return point after point,” she added.

That readiness was tested immediately by Chinese Taipei’s Sung Shuo Yun, an opponent she had drawn at the season opener for the second year in a row. Sindhu took time to find her range, trailing 1-7 and then 4-8, but there were early signs that her movement and timing were falling back into place. A run of forehand winners and decisive counter-attacks brought her a 11-9 lead at the interval. The turnaround was capped by a disguised backhand drive to close out the opening game. Sindhu eventually came through 21-13, 22-20 in a 51-minute win.

Her most authoritative display came in the round-of-16 clash against Tomoka Miyazaki. The two-time Olympic medallist looked sharp and assured, sweeping aside the Japanese teenager 21-8, 21-13. The match stood out for the clarity of her attacking intent. She backed her power game consistently, with diagonal drops and flat smashes, and once she seized control, the contest never became complicated. Not once did Miyazaki take the lead, as the Indian dictated both pace and space throughout.

In the quarterfinals, Sindhu faced reigning world champion Akane Yamaguchi, who entered the match wearing a knee brace. Sindhu took charge early, racing through the opening game 21-11 in just over 10 minutes with sharp, short-back-swing winners and relentless pressure from the back court. Yamaguchi, visibly hampered, retired after the first game, sending the veteran into her first Super 1000 semifinal in three years.

The last-four battle against China’s Wang Zhiyi offered the clearest picture of where Sindhu, a former world No. 2, currently stands. The final scoreline of 21-16, 21-15 did not fully reflect the pressure Wang was put under, as Sindhu led in the opening phases of both games and repeatedly forced her to defend in a demanding 52-minute contest. For Wang, who had seen her World Championships campaign in Paris cut short by the Indian last year, playing well with her ability to tighten rallies and absorb pace proved decisive.

The two tournaments that followed showed how fragile Sindhu’s return still was. At the India Open, she suffered a first-round loss to Vietnam’s Thuy Linh Nguyen, going down 22-20, 12-21, 15-21. At the Indonesia Masters a week later, she rebuilt momentum with wins over Manami Suizu and Line Kjaersfeldt, the latter turning out to be her 500th career victory and making her the first Indian shuttler to reach the landmark in women’s singles. Then she faced Chen Yufei in the quarterfinals. The Chinese top seed, whom Sindhu has now lost to five times in a row, ruled the game with her classic half-smashes. Chen started with a five-point lead in the opening game before Sindhu earned her break with a net kill. The Indian produced a few winners but struggled to move ahead, eventually dropping the first game 13-21.

Sindhu began the second game with renewed intent, moving into a 4-2 lead and staying marginally ahead until the mid-game interval. The turning point came soon after. With the score reading 11-12, she lost her second challenge on a close front-court line call. The following rally brought another marginal decision against her, and frustration began to creep in.

Her protests to the umpire were not well received, and she was shown a yellow card for misconduct. A rattled Sindhu soon slipped to 12-16. Moments later, she was penalised for delaying play just as Chen was preparing to serve, resulting in a red card and a point default. Even Chen appeared startled by the call. Despite the disruption, she fought back to reduce the deficit to a single point, but Chen eventually closed out the game 21-17.

“A tough loss when decisions shape the match. Progress is showing. Time to keep building,” Sindhu wrote on X. This quarterfinal captured a recurring theme of her 2025 season, with Sindhu losing from winning or level positions in short, match-defining point sequences.

The 2025 journey

When 2025 began, Sindhu was no longer operating with the cushion of a top seeding or ranking. The women’s singles circuit had compressed sharply, with younger players competing with greater belief that they could win and increasingly, they did.

The Indian’s season began at the India Open with a clear sense of transition. It was her first tournament under Indonesian coach Irwansyah, the former men’s singles coach credited with shaping Jonatan Christie and Anthony Ginting. She described the phase as a new beginning, acknowledging that it would take time to build rhythm and understanding with a coach whose emphasis lay on reading opponents and sharpening tactical choices. On court, the signs were mixed. She reached the quarterfinals, beating Sung and Suizu before losing a three-game contest to Indonesia’s Gregoria Mariska Tunjung.

The stretch following the India Open was marked by a string of first-round exits that stalled any chance of momentum. At the Indonesia Masters, she went out in the round of 32, losing in straight games to Nguyen. The All England Open, however, saw the most crushing of her three defeats. Sindhu appeared firmly in command against Korea’s Kim Ga-eun, leading 20-12 in the opening game, before a sudden loss of momentum saw her rival claw back with seven straight points.

While she closed out the first game 21-19, there was more relief than celebration, a reflection of how clearly the tide began to turn. Kim’s defensive resilience and repeated use of cross-court, round-the-head shots into Sindhu’s backhand began to turn rallies. Once the Korean took control, the Indian was unable to arrest the slide, losing 21-19, 13-21, 13-21 in 61 minutes. The Swiss Open a week later followed a similar script; she exited again in the opening round, losing 17-21, 19-21 to Denmark’s Julie Jakobsen to mark her third consecutive first-round loss of the season.

The middle stretch of 2025 offered little respite. At the Badminton Asia Championships, Sindhu reached the round of 16 before losing a three-game contest to Yamaguchi. It was a match that displayed both her ability to stay competitive against elite opposition and the difficulty of sustaining control through decisive phases.

Uneven returns continued in the Super 500 and Super 750 events. She fell in the opening round of the Malaysia Masters, losing in three games to Nguyen for her fourth first-round defeat in five tournaments. In Singapore, she reached the second round but went down in three games to Olympic champion Chen after pushing the Chinese for over an hour. The Indonesia Open provided a rare release as Sindhu edged past long-time rival Nozomi Okuhara in a three-game battle, only to fall in the round of 16.

The East Asian leg proved similarly taxing. Sindhu suffered another early exit at the Japan Open, losing in straight games to Sim Yu Jin, a defeat that left her with five first-round and three second-round exits in the season by mid-July. At the China Open, however, she produced her most significant win of of the year, defeating world No. 7 Miyazaki in three games. This was her first victory over a top-10 player since late 2024 but she bowed out in the pre-quarterfinals. The loss came against 18-year-old Unnati Hooda in the round of 16 as the teenager became the only Indian woman in the last five years to beat India’s most decorated women’s singles player.

That momentum briefly carried into the World championships in Paris, where Sindhu delivered her strongest performance of the year. She dismantled Zhiyi in the round of 16 and came within touching distance of a sixth Worlds medal, losing narrowly in the quarterfinals to Putri Kusuma Wardani after being in contention deep into the deciding game. Yet consistency again proved elusive. She exited in the opening round of the Hong Kong Open, losing for the first time to Line Christophersen, before closing the season at the China Masters with a quarterfinal finish, her third last-eight appearance of the year. That run ended with Sindhu again falling to An Se-young, against whom she remains 0-8 in their career head-to-head.

In 2024, the 29-year-old still collected titles and podium finishes. In 2025, there were no trophies, multiple first-round exits, and quarterfinals became the outer limit of her progress.

Slipping away

Taken together, Sindhu’s 2025 results point not to a player in decline, but to one repeatedly undone at the business end of matches. Scores from the past year show the pattern.

Nine of her 14 losses in 2025 followed a familiar pattern: matches in which she either held clear leads or clawed her way back to parity late in games, only to lose clusters of points that turned the match decisively against her.

These were not contests where she was comprehensively outplayed from start to finish, but ones lost in short, four or five points at a time when execution and clarity mattered most.

The All England Open loss to Kim, where she led 18-9 before surrendering control, the Indonesia Masters defeat to Nguyen after holding six game points, and the India Open quarterfinal against Tunjung, where she stayed level deep into the decider before fading, all followed similar arcs.

The Sudirman Cup loss to Kjaersfeldt, where she conceded long point runs from commanding positions in both games, and the Swiss Open defeat to Jakobsen further reinforced the pattern.

There were also defeats that reflected the current and in some cases upcoming hierarchy of the sport rather than missed opportunities. Against Se-young at the China Masters, Wardani at the World Championships, Yu Jin at the Japan Open, Hooda at the China Open, and Thuy Linh at the Malaysia Masters, Sindhu was largely chasing the match throughout.

The Olympian’s own emphasis on movement without hesitation speaks to the foundation required to address that finishing problem. The fight, as she put it, has returned. The next challenge is ensuring it lasts until the last point.