Okay I guess you are referring to next year 2016 All England I guess. Well to be honest Lee Yong Dae / Yoo Yeon Seong still cannot convince me that they are the best MD yet. They are still the beatable pair. And this has also been proven. I still remembered how both of them have lost to unranked MD players before. Last year they lose tamely to Josche Jurwonne / Johannes Schotler. And they have lost to Mohammad Ahsan / Hendra Setiawan many times too. They have also lose to Mads / Mads before. Anyway although they may have shown that they have won a streak of gold medals recently but it is still not convincing enough to say that they are peaking now. Perhaps both have shown signs of improvement recently but definitely they are not at the top yet. Hope it clarifies your question. They are not peaking now rather they are just showing signs of improvement.
She is just going thru a bad year. Expecting an all time great to fail to overturn a lean patch is like expecting the sun to rise from West. In all sports, all greats except Marciano and Mayweather have encountered atleast one lean patch, and every single one of them overcame them. So will WYH. And LD isnt even in a lean patch (Remember Asiad?). He simply is toying, inculcating a false sense of confidence in the field.
Goodnight guys. Hope our shuttlers will give me a reason to rejoice soon. Those whose players are in the finals tomorrow, best of luck. Hope for exciting matches.
For anybody to say LD - LCW era is a weak one, is simply absurd. Just because a few much younger rising stars at their prime are starting to beat the relatively aged old guards, LD and LCW, who are both past 30 and in the tail end of their careers - to use this to base their argument on is unsound, invalid, flawed, weak, senseless, unjustified, groundless. Go ask Taufik Hidayat, Peter Gade, Lee Hyun Il, Bao Chunlai, Chen Jin, Sony DK, Simon Santoso, Kenneth Jonassen, and other contemporaries. I believe Chen Long would agree with me too, based on what he has said before about Lin Dan's peers. I reiterate, Lin Dan's era is the Golden Age of MS, even better than Zhao Jianhua-Yang Yang's era, a respectful or close second best, if you like.
LCW's confidence is back for now. He is riding on a high. He will beat CTC for his first SS title of the year. Goodnight.
I hope the organiser of the tournaments will take into consideration the timing of the schedule. The timing and schedule of the tournament should be more appealing to the Asia viewers in general even if the tournament is held in western countries. This can certainly be done. For example the matches on the second round of the tournament started at 3 pm. Well this could have been better arranged and let the match start at 9 am in the morning which would have been a better timing for Asia viewers too. Then because the matches started at 3 pm the last match at court 2 ended at 2 am France time. Well, I pity both of the players for that last match. Both waited till 1 am to play their match. I felt that it is rather unfair for them too. Then the quarterfinal match yesterday started at 5 pm France time. Another bad arrangement. Why not let the match start at 9 am which is again more suitable for Asian timing? Then today arrangement of the schedule is equally bad start only at 3 pm France timing. If the matches could have started at 9 am it would have been better for Asia viewers. Things to take note. The matches for this tournament started late in the evenings which is not suitable for Asia viewers as it means that matches will only start late at night for Asia viewers here. That is why for me if that particular week there is a tournament held in Western country and Asia country I would prefer to watch the live matches of the Asia country. For example last week there was Denmark Open and to be honest last week I skip the Denmark Open and didn't watch any of the matches live. But then I choose to watch the Taiwan Grand Prix Open live because the timing of the match is just nice and suitable for Asia viewers although it is only a second tier tournament. I am writing this not to condemn but I seriously hope that someone from BWF would read this message and take note of this before more Asia fans are shun away due to the improper timing and scheduling of matches. With that I end here.
Why do you think so? Just because their opponents - LD's and LCW's - say so? In fact, they are praising themselves by stating that. What I remember from the last few years when LD and LCW were at their best, is them taking most of the titles throughout the year. Even more so, completely dominating in the majors. LD winning Gold most of the times. LCW winning silver more often than not, other opponents not standing a chance in the least. Why is that? Because LD and LCW are very special in their skills, especially in their consistency? Or because the opponents were a lot weaker (than nowadays)? I think it's a bit of both. We don't see this kind of domination of only one or two players nowadays. Also the consistency is lacking; most players in the top 20 beat each other on a consistent basis. I think it's because most of them are very close in terms of skill and nobody can get his nose in front in terms of consistency. LCW and LD are/were very special in that aspect, in fact, special in all parts of the game. Does this mean that LD's and LCW's era was weak? I don't know. But it seems like they had an immense advantage above most opponents. Either because they were the only outstanding players in MS of that era or because there are a lot more good players nowadays than before...
Fact is, in 10 years, we'll be saying this era is the best etc etc, and then in another 10 years beyond that, we'll be saying that era is the best. It's just the nature of sports. Is Usain Bolt better than Carl Lewis? Humans have taken sports professionalism to higher and higher levels. We'll continue to see increments of improvement for many decades to come, across all sports. Lin Dan just happens to be the most successful badminton MS player of the past decade. But his peak level of play will be surpassed (if it hasn't already). Those who deny this are just in...denial.
LD and LCW still hold the record for most OG medals, WC wins, SS wins and ranked number 1 on the SS circuit for the longest time. No other player has come close or will foreseeably come close to dominating the game as much as they have.
Remember badminton only existed in the Olympics since 1992. There have only been 6 badminton Olympics? Of course not many people will have many OG medals. And the world champs only started becoming a yearly thing recently. And "Superseries" tournaments only existed since 2006? There just hasn't been enough time for anyone else to "dominate" if we're going to measure dominance by success in the above. You know what sporting dominance is? Donald Bradman's test batting average of 99.94. No one has ever come close to that, and statistics in cricket has been recorded for over a century.
LD said in interview that such a conception, frequent amongst his fan, is incorrect and unfair to him
Agree, well said. See above in bold. Perhaps there is something we fans will never know. Perhaps a few years after LCW retires, he will tell you why. Hopefully by then, you guys are still around.
Just because LD and LCW dominated in their time doesn't mean their peers and contemporaries are weak, what's the basis or logic for saying that? The fact these two were/are in a league of their own, towering above everybody else only tells you how great they are, not how weak the rest are. Otherwise, PG's claim of LD being the best in history, LHI calling him the perfect shuttler, JOJ regarding him the best ever, and LCW himself acknowledging there's only one LD - what to make of these statements ? Whose words carry more weight, who is more qualified to make such assertions? Apart from PG and TH who have since retired - surely they are not weak at all - some others are still around in active competition and beating young up-and-comers now and then, notably, Lee Hyun Il,Boonsak Ponsana, Hu Yun, Wei Nan (age 31),P Kashyap (age 29), Sho Sasaki, J O Jorgensen (age 27), Tommy Sugiarto (age 27), H K Vittinghus (age 29),Marc Zwiebler (age 31), Rajiv Ouseph (age 29), Son Wan Ho (age 27), and you name it. Need I say more ? I mean every age or era in sports has a dominant figure or two winning most of the accolades. For example, in cricket, Tendulkar; in tennis Federer,Nadal,Djokovic, Steffi Graf, Navratilova,etc; in table tennis, Deng Yaping, Jan Ove Waldner, Wang Nan, Zhang Yining,Liu Guoliang, etc; in chess, Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Bobby Fischer; in F1 auto racing, Michael Schumacher, Alain Prost, Ayrton Senna,etc;... I'm sure you have your own list. I humbly believe I've made my point. Enough said.
And funny thing JOJ is of this era.....LoLLLLLLLLLL...Momota of this era couldn't handle 40% LD this year....This era's VA gets spanked by LCW every time they meet....Heck,This era's CTC couldn't beat an injured LD last year...What's the fuss about????????????
So, instead of medals the winners get to take home some glass art... but my question is, why the runner up gets the bigger one, while the winner gets the smaller punier one?
So it is difficult to compare players of different eras. Here the time difference or era is just transitional or one comes closely after the other, so the difference is not very great. Players from the older eras may not be as deficient or ineffective against players of the modern era as many may believe. The case of 8-time AE champion Rudy Hartono has been raised.
