PARIS, Aug 2 — National women’s doubles pair Pearly Tan-M. Thinaah want to quickly recuperate from their semi-final defeat to world number one Chen Qing Chen-Jia Yi Fan to continue their historic journey in the Paris 2024 Olympics.
The world number 12 pair, who made history as the first Malaysian women’s doubles to reach the last four stages in the Olympics, suffered a 12-21, 21-18, 15-21 defeat after a 78-minute intense battle against the reigning silver medalist at the Porte de La Chapelle Arena today.
But the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games champions still have a chance to achieve another unprecedented record, to become Malaysia’s first women’s doubles to win an Olympics medal, when facing Japan’s world number four Nami Matsuyama-Chiharu Shida in the bronze-medal playoff tomorrow.
“We are really very happy that we came this far, we just want to reset our mindset, calm ourselves down for a while, and then recover well, sleep well and focus for tomorrow. We still have a lot of positives to take from this game.
“Every athlete will want to win a medal, but I think we do not want to put too much pressure on ourselves like we have been saying to each other on the court; we just want to enjoy every single rally that we have,” Thinaah told Bernama after the semi-finals.
Asked about the differences they made in the second game to be able to challenge the mighty Chinese pairs into a rubber set, she said after losing the first set, they wanted to avoid making simple mistakes and increase the pressure on Qing Chen-Yi Fan.
“They were really eager to kill the shots, which helped us to win the second set, but at the end, they were more experienced and played quite aggressively towards the end to make it harder for us to counter back.
"It was not an easy road since the group stage, many didn’t believe in us, but we just need to believe in each other,” she said.
Meanwhile, Tan said Chen-Jia were well prepared to tackle all their smashes and rallies, compared to the Group A match on Saturday (July 27), when the Malaysians went down 17-21, 20-22.
“I think for today’s match, they studied our game well, whatever shuttle we give, they were really ready for it, they were more prepared than the group stage.
“They did not let us take too many points, they will quickly amend errors. They are mentally very strong; that is why world number one, something that we need to learn from them,” she said.
Tan-Thinaah, who started the group stage campaign with a defeat to Chen-Jia, managed to turn their fortunes around by creating an extraordinary victory over Japanese pair Mayu Matsumoto-Wakana Nagahara and Indonesians Apriyani Rahayu-Siti Fadia Silva Ramadhanti to survive the 'group of death'.
In another semi-final, world number three Liu Sheng Shu-Tang Ning beat Matsuyama-Shida 21-16, 21-19 to set up an all-China final tomorrow.
— Bernama
