ARTICLE - Testing The Limits

Alistair in action at the recent BWF World Championships in Malaysia and in a rare outing at a domestic event, last years Bank Of Scotland International Championships

Scotland has many world class athletes on its books right now.  Andy Murray is a world top 10 tennis player, brother Jamie has just won a Wimbledon title.  Chris Paterson is the planet’s most reliable goalkicker, while Jason White would make any world rugby XV.  Julie Fleeting has scored more goals for Scotland than Denis Law and Kenny Dalglish combined.  Gold winning Olympians like Chris Hoy and Shirley Robertson certify the fact that for a ‘small country’, we have some pretty big names out there. But there are other sports in Scotland that fall just below the radar of ‘world class’.  Sports that have decent playing numbers and a strong structure, but they just don’t feature in the ranks of the ultra elite. 

Take badminton for example.  Badminton Scotland is one of the country’s best run and efficiently organised NGBs.  They have quality coaching staff, including the likes of Dan Travers and Rita Gao Yuan, and a first class facility in the National Badminton Academy at Scotstoun.  There is no dearth of talent in the playing ranks either.  Susan Hughes, undoubtedly Scotland’s best known player, is a Commonwealth medalist and a Beijing Olympics hope, with much of her career still ahead of her.  In the doubles and mixed doubles, with the triumvirate of Emma Mason, Imogen Bankier and Watson Briggs, Scotland has another three team players who have shown glimpses of real top level potential in the last twelve months.

But therein lies the problem; medalist, hope, glimpses of potential; all positive words, but not in the same echelons as world champion, gold medalist, Olympian.  This is no slur on Badminton Scotland, its staff and least of all its players.  They are fine athletes and are still very young in their careers.  But they would admit themselves that they are not quite punching with the big boys yet.

So what is missing that could make them better?  Why are they not in the same class as the Chinese or the Indonesians, who dominate the international game?  Is it physical, technical, mental?  All three? It is hard to say exactly.  But what isn’t a grey area is that there is no doubting that the Asian nations, particularly China, have a firm foothold on the podium places of international badminton.  They are the standard to which talented Scottish players must aspire. And the best way to get to grips with the Asians?  Well, to quote an utterly clichéd but entirely appropriate phase: ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.’

Former Scotland internationalist and badminton coach Kenny Middlemiss told In The Winning Zone earlier this year that to get onto a level playing field with the Asians, Scottish players must spend more time in their environment.  Go out there, train as they train, live as they live and, eventually, hopefully, play as they play. It is common practice.  Environment matters.  British skiers don’t train in Britain, they go to France, Switzerland, America and Canada, where the snow, and the quality of competition, is much higher.  The very best footballers in Ireland don’t stay at home playing for their local amateur club, they move across to England or Scotland to become professionals, improve their game and make their name.  And so it is that badminton should consider adopting the same policy.

Furthermore, the concept is no longer entering into the realms of the unknown.  One go-getting Scot already has the story to tell. 

And while, admittedly, Alistair Casey hasn’t quite conquered the global badminton stage, the story of what he has done, and more importantly what he has learned, is an insight into the benefits of immersing an athlete into a regime of the highest calibre, as he explained to In The Winning Zone from his base in Singapore after another back-breaking training session, greeting us with a throat cracking introduction to the rigours of his daily routine.

“Another day of training, another day of acute dehydration.”  He didn’t move to the Far East to go sightseeing, then !

“I had an idea of where I wanted my level to be, and I based it against the top players in the world.  I made the decision that to stand a reasonable chance of playing at that level, I need to get myself in a better pool of players, I need to be training at their level.

“I don’t feel Scotland offers that.  And that’s not a criticism.  There is always going to be one country better than another in any sport.”

A fair point.  No-one expects Scotland to be the best in the world at badminton.  It is the same in most sports.  Should we be able to bend it better than Brazil in football, attack like the All Blacks on the rugby pitch?  We want to and should always aspire to be world class, and we are pretty close to it at present, but no-one should shocked to see us lose to such sporting giants as they.

Maybe we should stick to our more localised, traditional sports; golf?  Well, maybe not, not while Tiger and Annika are around.  Maybe shinty and caber throwing are the way forward?  The point is, to a large extent, success in sport is down to two things.  Playing numbers and finances available for development, and one begets the other.

So Alistair decided to fund off his own back, using capital generated from his time spent working in the licensed trade in Glasgow. 

“Badminton is a minority sport in Scotland, and it is funded as a minority sport, so there is little to no money.  So when I make the decision to commit properly I'm doing it self funded, when I invest time and money into my sport I have to be able to justify to myself now that  I am getting efficiency and value for my time and money.”

So what has he learned from his time in Singapore?  What are we missing in Scotland?

“I think first of all, in Asia, the average technical level is higher.  They start playing from a much younger age and many hours are put in on a technical level. Immediately you are under a lot more pressure from the quality of shot.  It doesn’t matter how fit you are and how fit you feel you might be when you cant get the shuttle back, if the guy is playing shots that put you under extreme pressure, you are going to break.

“So I’ve learned that the quality of my shot and my technical level has to improve and It’s not far off.  I have high quality technical shots, but it’s not about playing 2 or 3 out of 10, its about 10 out of 10, every rally and regardless of pressure.

“I also think a huge part of it comes down to the physical training.  I’m a naturally fit guy, and most of the players we have in Scotland are really quite fit guys.  But it is a different level.  Guys are training here 36 hours a week and doing obscene training sessions in comparison, to many its "extreme training" in Asia but its not, its the difference thats extreme."

And while in the West we laud the proficiencies of sports psychologists, and indeed have seen athletes attribute much of their success to the influence of such people, on the other side of the world there is simply no need, as Casey explained.

“I was talking to a Chinese coach and I asked him ‘do you have sports psychologists in China?’  And he said ‘no, we don’t need them.  Anyone who has survived our system doesn’t need a sports psychologist.’  That highlights quite a lot.  The training is so hard and so beyond what is expected elsewhere that there is no question in their mind that they can go out and do the business.  They have absolutely no doubt that they will walk onto court against people who can’t compete with them physically."

Is this a marker of our insecurities, or just confirmation that primal human instinct is the strongest mental tool of all?  Either way, the fact that an athlete can be so confident in his own ability as to not require or desire psychological training is quite ominous for the mindset of his opponents.

Alistair continued by discussing the consistency that such a regime can bring. 

“It’s all about the level of your default game.  I play about 30 competitive weekends.  I will peak for two of them, maybe.  So you need to look at what your worst result is when you have a bad day.  You want that to be at least a quarter final or semi final and then you need to think of the workload you have to be putting in to make that level.  This is something that people don’t grasp. 
“We have players in Scotland who are good on their day, good in one round, everybody is.  But it counts for nothing.  You go out and have a good result, and then spend 6 tournaments in a row getting beaten.

“The people who are going out and winning these tournaments are consistently getting quarters and semis, not playing at their best.  They aren’t peaking at every event.  Their average or default level is just so much higher.”

“The experience that has come out of that is that it is a long journey.  It is not as simple as ‘Alistair, you are going to go to Asia for six months and then you will break the top 30 in the world.’[his highest ranking has been 67]  I definitely believe it is achievable but it is a long daily physical haul and two to three years to get there.”

Unfortunately, he may never know.  Alistair is currently back in Europe, and is instead looking to take on a high profile role as Regional Manager for the Badminton World Federation (BWF) and work these new commitments around his international playing commitments. Indeed still compete for his club, Paracuellos (Madrid) when time allows. 

But perhaps we should sidestep that matter and take a look at what he has gained.  The BWF know it, that’s why they want him to help develop other players.

He may or may not return to the regime that he imposed upon himself.  He may or may not look back on his career in ten years time and say, ‘I wish I had stuck at it’.  It is difficult to maintain any level of sports career when you are self funding, and when jobs come, they are often to tempting to turn down.  Such is the life of a young man competing in a smaller sport.

But what Alistair Casey has learned, and what he has passed on, is just as important as what he has done.  He's giving it a shot, and the lessons being learned are as valuable as any trophy or ranking.

“It doesn’t matter what country I go to, someone will always be telling you how hard they train.  But I’m honest with myself.  I’m training harder than I’ve ever trained before and I still don’t think I’m training hard enough.  “The reward is the satisfaction gained personally from putting in the work.  It is the balance of results against performance.  “There’s nobody that hates losing more than me, but there should be an element of pride in your performance and level that is brought in training, on court and competition.”

RO
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