Back to Basics for Kashyap
There aren’t many men’s singles players in their mid-30s contesting the HSBC BWF World Tour. Parupalli Kashyap is one of the few, Tommy Sugiarto is another, and they were playing each other recently in the first…
· DEV SUKUMAR
There aren’t many men’s singles players in their mid-30s contesting the HSBC BWF World Tour. Parupalli Kashyap is one of the few, Tommy Sugiarto is another, and they were playing each other recently in the first round of the PERODUA Malaysia Masters 2022. They’d last faced each other on the circuit 10 years ago, which is an unusually long gap for contemporaries ranked in the top 10 during their best years.
Until he played the two events in Malaysia, Kashyap had been out of competitive action for three months due to a series of hamstring injuries and a twisted ankle. It’s come to the stage when injuries will become a frequent occurrence, and Kashyap is thinking aloud on the right workload for his body – sufficient to make him match-fit, yet not cause a breakdown.
“Just before the (selection) trials, three days before, I pulled my hamstring and that took a long time to heal. I came back, pulled it again, came back, pulled it again,” he says, reeling off a laundry list of his injuries over the last few years (back, knee, shoulder dislocation). “So it was like four weeks of this nonsense.”