A Night at the Badminton

Ever since inventing football in 1992, Sky Sports has received a fair dollop of grief for its role in the steady erosion of competition and upward mobility at the sharp end of our national game, as ever higher piles of TV lucre are funnelled to ever fewer clubs with a realistic chance of winning anything, these increasingly rich clubs forming a de facto cartel lording it over the rest – including, of course, our own wee Nottingham Forest, winner of more European Cups than Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal combined.

 

On the other hand, Sky has given TV exposure and a cash injection to several niche sports – Gaelic football, darts, rugby league, netball, handball and speedway among them. And now badminton, with the formation of the National Badminton League, a six-team televised affair designed to bring the magic of the country’s fifth-largest participation sport to a wider audience – at least, to those with a Sky subscription.   

 

Anyway, it was with a sense of big-event anticipation that I skipped past the TV trucks outside the Albert Hall for Nottingham University’s derby clash with Loughborough University, before sweeping excitedly down through the lobby and up into the salubrious, intimate surrounds of the main auditorium – six hairpinned rows of Bondi blue leather seats flanked lengthways by a vaulted, richly carpeted concourse off which, in the Balmoral Gallery, various VIPs (according to their lanyards rather than their not-sure-I’ve-seen-you-in-Heat faces) nibbled canapés, while techy types gaffer-taped cables into place as the various pre-event activities unfolded, including a low-key demo from the England Para-Badminton squad. The NBL’s marketing manager says there was a conscious push to move the games out of drab, boxy sports centres – Birmingham hosted a game in a shopping arcade – and the Albert Hall certainly must look proper plush on the tellybox.

 

With the business hour approaching, pastry flakes were brushed from lapels, TV lights were fired up and the auditorium slowly filled – the crowd (which was definitely more hello daahling than eyup mi’duck) being allowed to sit wherever they fancied (aside from the spaces designated for VIPs and players). A merry troop of UoN ushers milled about, yet it was all low-key, relaxed, mercifully free of dead-eyed, puffa-jacketed, earpiece-wearing gorillas, as order was spontaneously, gently and politely generated from within.

 

This being very much a made-for-TV spectacle, however, the genteel pre-game atmosphere was not allowed to gestate at its own sweetly organic rhythm, nor to settle at its own hugger-muggering pitch. No, the build-up saw a raucous din positively browbeaten into existence, whether you liked it or not (not, for what it's worth): the main sponsors had handed out some pom-pom air sticks, a few youngsters had brought along duck whistles that made the vuvuzela sound like a saxophone, and an MC sought to whip the obliging sections of the crowd into a chanting lather. As I believe Oscar Wilde may once have quipped: "Hell is an obligatory Mexican wave".

 

It all felt slightly forced and unnecessary – in fact, such artifice immediately makes you suspicious that the bells and whistles are there to mask the tedium of the actual show, yet that decidedly isn’t the case with top-level badminton, which is a relentlessly, breathlessly thrilling and athletic affair. The doubles in particular is a light-speed choreography of muscle explosion, split-second decision-making, sub-conscious geometry, peripheral vision and telepathic dovetailing, semi-verbal cajolings, physical contortion, and two-moves-ahead tactics – even though, in badminton, defence becomes attack, and vice versa, at bewildering speed. Which is why it’s such a compelling spectacle.

 

Thankfully, some of the pre-match cacaphony dissipates during the match, the crowd respectfully falling quiet for each point and allowing the plinking polyrhythms of the rallies to resonate around the hall: the rat-a-tat of service-line defenceattack suddenly giving way to some swooshing drop shot, then a steel-wristed flick into the back court is followed by a clearance into the dusty upper atmosphere, the shuttle darting forward at speeds of 260kph then dropping like a parachutist, from warp-speed to bullet-time in the blink of an eye.  

 

Well, I say it falls quiet … It’s quiet except for Sky’s commentators – seated out in the open at the stage end of the hall, where a colossal church organ looms ominously over proceedings, dwarfing the cameraman perched on the scaffold-pulpit in front of it – whose off-the-cuff critiques must be plainly audible on court: “Blair looking cumbersome in the back court there”; “that’s gotta be the worst serve since the 1948 Olympics”; “she really doesn’t want to get tight on this point now, does she?”

And it was quiet except for the drummer that Loughborough had in tow, although he didn’t have much to bang about during the first three rubbers, as the mixed doubles and both singles games went to the green-and-golds of Nottingham (this being somewhat surprising to myself, a former 1st XI cricketer at UoN and thus deeply conditioned to expect a pounding from the University of Athletic Excellence Pursued at the Possible Expense of Intellectual Development).

 

While doubles is rarely anything other than an explosive, high-octane affair, singles rallies contain their relative longueurs, as players jockey for court position until striking hard. It seems more taxingly physical and front-to-back, a game of stamina rather than (just) quicksilver reflex. The longer points invariably conclude with both players taking the scenic route back into position, burgling a few precious seconds to suck in the oxygen. (Perhaps this is also the reason the best rallies seem to finish with relatively sober micro-celebrations, lacking the fist-pumping ostentation of tennis, which would all be just too knackering.)

 

The ladies singles featured an all-Eastern European affair between two players picked up in the pre-season auction (at which Nottingham skipper and Commonwealth gold medalist Chris Adcock was the top purchase). Luffbra’s ringlet-haired Bulgarian leftie, Linda Zetchiri, annoyed by a couple of line decisions, threatened to go the full McEnroe until either she remembered she was on TV or was somehow sedated by the soothing curves of the architecture itself. Shame. Even so, descent into near-radge could not inspire her to victory over Belarusian Olga Konon.

 

After Kieran Merrilees had made short work of Loughborough’s Greg Mairs to seal an unassailable 3-0 lead, the purple-and-white-clad visitors breezed through the ladies doubles – significant, because each game, rather than overall result, is what counts in the league standings – before it was time for the final game: the men’s doubles, featuring Adcock and the nerveless 18-year-old debutant Adam Hall (no relation to Albert) against the seasoned Loogabarooga tag-team of Peter Briggs and the exquisitely named Harley Towler.

 

It would be a thrilling climax to things – this a direct result of having the NBL go on (or go off) in front of the Sky cameras, the format having been televisually-tweaked to provide maximum, fizzing tension. The rules, basically, are that every point scores (as opposed to only scoring when serving), and if you lose a point you won’t be serving on the next one. Nine points wins you a set, three sets wins you the match. If it’s 2-2 in sets, then you play first-to-five in the tiebreaker (or until a team has a three-point lead, if that's sooner). It’s all designed to create spectacle, and it succeeds. Spectacularly.

 

Indeed, the men’s doubles encapsulated badminton’s exhilarating mix of finesse and power, touch and athleticism, the stretched sinews of each rally bringing carnal exhalations – now James Brown-style grunts, now the sound of some karate chopper going through a stack of roof tiles – as a Sampras-style slam-dunk smash is thraped from the back-court.

 

Then there were the rallies at close quarters, all last-nanosecond wrist contortion and torso torsion, the players squat-hopping to take the shuttle above the shoulders (with extraordinary, robot-like racquet-head control), denying the opponent crucial time to recover balance. It’s a maelstrom of swerving and swaying bodies, like some high-speed capoeira routine or Persian sword dance, limbs flashed out to the point of dislocation to push back a malevolent flick towards the throat – the idea being, in this compressed and claustrophobic space, to hit the shuttle within their reach, too close for them to react (and there is just no space in the doubles: the positively intimidating stance of service receivers, waggling their racquets menacingly over the net, appear like cartoon pine trees over a forest picnic).  

 

With the frenzied speed of the game and Habsburg opulence of the venue; with the coaches, beetling back and forth with their clipboards, switching ends each game; with people wandering around the gallery, attention dropping in and out of the game; with other spectators with no assigned seat number moving about as though in some vast game of musical chairs – all this creates the sense of swirling fantasia, a three-hour carousel ride that complements what is, on court, a riotously joyous and good-natured affair.

 

There seems remarkably little scope for gamesmanship or tetchiness between the competitors. Indeed, the players’ faces, even after rally-ending errors, are invariably plastered with wry grins, the absence of that tightly-wound, scowling self-castigation emanating, no doubt, from the sheer exuberance of badminton’s predominantly instinctual play – play that often runs ahead of conscious calculation.

And so, having won a nailbiting fourth set 9-8 to keep the rubber alive, Nottingham duly clinch an epic closing game 5-4 in the ‘breaker and there are smiles all round as the auditorium rises to salute both teams. And while it’s true that winners are grinners, it's also the case that grinners are always winners.  

Nottingham’s 4-1 victory moved them up to third in the table with two rounds of matches to go. The next match is at home against Surrey Smashers on March 23, followed by an away fixture at Derby on April 27. Tickets are available here.

National Badminton League website