Saturday January 19, 2013
Coach Tat Meng will let women’s singles team focus more on training
NATIONAL women’s singles coach Wong Tat Meng is prepared to reduce the number of badminton tournaments for his charges and let them focus more on training.
Malaysian women Sonia Cheah, Yang Li Lian and Tee Jing Yi were impressive in the ongoing Maybank Malaysian Open.
World No. 58 Sonia did well to beat world No. 37 Sayaka Takahashi of Japan in the first round.
The 19-year-old, however, failed to make the most of chances in the second round, going down to China’s Yao Xue 16-21, 15-21.
Li Lian and Jing Yi also put up a strong performance before bowing out to China’s Yao Xue and Deng Xuan respectively.
And Tat Meng believes that with more training time, his players would gradually step up to the mark.
“It was not a good performance from Sonia. She was far from her usual self and she made a lot of mistakes,” said Tat Meng.
“But I don’t blame her because she is still recovering from an ankle injury and I actually wanted to pull her out of the tournament had the physio not given her the green light to play.
“In fact, she’s definitely one of our brightest prospects, alongside Li Lian and Jing Yi. Right now we don’t have many singles players to work with but the trio have got what it takes.
“When I first came back after my Indonesia stint, I realised a lot of the women players were lacking training time and this has seen a huge gap in quality from the top players of the other countries.
“Thus my priority is to train them properly first, before sending them out for tournaments. It will definitely be more training and fewer tournaments this year.
“With that being said, it is also important to have at least one player qualifying for the World Championship and I will work towards that as well,” added Tat Meng.
The World Championships will be held in Guangzhou in August and a country can have three players in the meet if all three are ranked in the top 24.
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