MATCH PREDICTION: Sindhu-led Chennai Smashers will trump confident Mumbai Rockets

HOME TEAM MUMBAI ROCKETS, winners of the inaugural match yesterday, will take on new entrants Chennai Smashers at the National Sports Club of India, Mumbai in the second match on Day 2 of the Premier Badminton League (PBL).

After recording a narrow win over the Awadhe Warriors, the Mumbai team will be high on confidence, but would do good not to forget that the Warriors were without the services of their ace player, Saina Nehwal. 

In their first season in the league, the Smashers are being coached by Ganguly Prasad. He has the experience of coaching for 17 long years and has guided the likes of Aparna Popat and P Gopichand. The shuttlers in the team have an excellent opportunity to be under his guidance.

On the other hand Nayyar (Mumbai's coach) will want to do better in the second match and their last home match. The learnings of the first match, especially chosing the Trump match, will come in handy today.

TFG analyses and predicts the winner of the match based on a possible line-up of players, as the teams have to announce their team and Trump match only an hour before the game.

RULES: Each tie comprises of 5 matches -- Men’s Singles, Men’s Doubles, Women’s Singles, Mixed Doubles & Men’s Singles.  Each Match will be played as best-of-three games, with each game being a race to 15 points and a sudden death at 14-14. After each team shares the list of players who will be playing the 5 matches and their choice of Trump match, the order of play will be mutually decided by the technical team of PBL & broadcaster Star India before each tie (from a neutral perspective) to keep the schedule unpredictable.

TRUMP MATCH: Each team strategically selects one of the 5 matches that they play in a Tie as their Trump match. In a Trump match, a victory gives the team a bonus point and a loss gives it a negative point. A team cannot put the same player in the Trump matches proposed by them more than twice in the league stage and once in the knockout stage i.e. if team A places 5 trump matches during the league stage, any player can take part in maximum two of those 5 matches. However, the participation of a player in a Trump match proposed by the opponent will not be counted in this maximum 2 criterion.

For scoring in a Trump match, victory in a normal match gives 1 point, loss carries 0 points. In a Trump match, the team that has called for the Trump gets 2 points for victory and -1 for a loss. However, the other team will play this match as a normal match and will either get 1 or 0 points for win or loss respectively. If both the teams place the Trump on the same match, then for both of them +2 or -1 scoring will apply for win or loss respectively.

MUMBAI ROCKETS vs CHENNAI SMASHERS

The following shuttlers are likely to play against each other in their respective categories: Men's singles: HS Prannoy (Mumbai) might face Sony Dwi Kuncoro (Chennai); Men's doubles: Vladimir Ivanov/Mathias Boe (Mumbai) against Chris Adcock/Toby Ng (Bengaluru); Women's singles between Han Li (Mumbai) and PV Sindhu (Chennai); Men's singles: Gurusaidutt (Mumbai) against Simon Santoso (Chennai); Mixed doubles: Mathias Boe/Kamilla Juhl (Mumbai) against Chris Adcock/Pia Zebaidah (Chennai).

It remains to be seen which matches each team will nominate as their Trump match. Prannoy losing his Trump match in the first tie against Awadhe might have put the Rockets team in a fix. They have exhausted one trump match on Prannoy so they might not want to use it again at the moment. Though Prannoy holds the upper hand over Dwi Kuncoro, 2-0, and is likely to win the singles match, it might be a risk to nominate this as their Trump match.

The doubles pair of Mumbai look even more strong after beating the pair from Awadhe. Ivanov/Boe will be the favourites to win over the Bengaluru pair of Adcock/Toby Ng. If Mumbai has learnt from their mistakes, they should choose the men's doubles as their Trump match.

Though Ruthvika of the Mumbai team won the singles match in the first match against Awadhe, it is unlikely that she will play the singles match today as Smashers has Sindhu in their team. Since the teams do not know who the opponents will be, Rockets will not take the chance of putting her through again.

It should be a no-brainer for Chennai to choose this as their trump match. PV Sindhu will have the upper hand of winning over the Chinese player. Though Sindhu is in not from the home team when she gets to the court she will be the crowd favourite.

The other men's singles match will be interesting as Gurusai would be beaming with confidence after the win over Sai Praneeth in the first match. But the Indian shuttler might be put to test against the Indonesian Santoso. The latter leads 1-0 over the Indian in the head-to-head count, so it is likely that this may go in favour of Chennai.

Adcock/Pia are specialists in the mixed doubles category, and therefore they hold the upper hand, but Boe/Kamilla should be a tough pair to beat.

Winning the Trump match will be crucial for Mumbai for winning this match. But even that might not be sufficient to see them through as the Sindhu-led Smashers should edge ahead today to register their first win.