This is being posted for a good friend and colleague of mine. Mr Fault. Height of Serve :: This is quite simple. The Laws state that the whole of the shuttle must be below the Player’s waist at the point of being hit / delivery. Therefore, the taller the Player is, the higher, from the court surface up, he/she can serve from. The advantage in being taller is obvious here. There are, of course, solutions to this – so as to take this ‘anomaly’ out of the Game. The most simple is to push the short-service line further back into the court. Service faults at the W.C. :: In the main, 90+% of all service faults were for shuttle above the waist at delivery. This is a coaching issue but has been ably helped by the recent change to the Service Law with regard to racket head. The change to the Service Law, which was put through as part of the New Scoring System, was such that the shaft of the racket at delivery now only needs to be pointing downward (1mm will do!). In response to this, Players hold the racket at the same point as before, flatten out the shaft and place the shuttle where the racket head now is. This point is quite dramatically higher than before. Serves were being delivered chest high not waist high. On balance, the service judges were quite lenient during the W.C.s. Impartiality of Technical / Court Officials :: For the match in question, MFT & LWF v LP & JR, the umpire was Irish, the service judge English, the line judges from Spain and around the world. A grand conspiracy? Some commonsense please. Crowd bias :: It was written elsewhere that the crowd were biased in favour of the Danish Players. This was the first match on court on Friday morning. The spectators were, as was the case on each of the preceding mornings, in the main made up of Spanish school children. This was the noisiest session of the Event, to that point. The crowd booed when MFT & LWF walked off court without shaking hands with either their opponents or the officials. If MFT & LWF had won they would have been cheered. The Spanish school children came to see a display of world class badminton. The Game of Badminton was on show here. Colonial attitude :: ??? Heaven help us – if this was the case surely the Irish umpire would have felt an affinity towards MFT & LWF. Afterall, they would be brothers in arms – both having been under British Rule (Ireland for 600+ years!). In the dictionary, Badminton is classified as a sport, not a method for settling old scores or re-living past ‘glories’. Caucasian V Asian :: see ‘Colonial Attitude’ – then cop on! You had to be there. Mr. Fault
