Saina not looking back in anger

“I want to play her now,” she says minutes after losing a curious last set to Maria Kristin Yulianti of Indonesia.

We wish. So she explains herself instead: “I don’t know what happened. Maybe I made a lot of mistakes. I don’t know.” Then: “I’ll be much more prepared next time. I’ll be much more experienced.”

At 18, she has time to acclimatise to her ambition. It is, also, not an airy promise. Today, it is not that she came so close to making it to the last four — in a three-gamer, she had a 28-26, 14-21, 11-3 lead, till Yulianti took away the last game 20-15. (There is a bronze medal playoff.) It is, as her coach Pullela Gopichand says, her desire to win so badly, her impatience with sitting back and looking for cheap points. In fact, if anything, she works too hard to create the point.

Badminton’s new scoring rules, in fact, make it that much easier for a match to be taken away. After Athens, a rallying point scoring system was introduced in which a point is won or lost on each serve. Earlier, points were scored only by the server and if the server lost the point, the serve would shift to the opponent, without a change in the scoreline. Now also factor in the fact that the shuttle travels at speeds faster than in any other net sport at the Games. Nehwal and Yulianti were the only unseeded players in the last eight, and Yualianti will now take on China’s Zhang Ning, the defending title-holder. (The top three seeds in the women’s draw are all Chinese.)

With the Olympics coincides India’s four-yearly conversation with sport. It’s not just an Indian habit. It’s when most everybody takes stock. After every match walk through the mixed zone — the area where...