Badminton Year-Ender: Top 5 shuttlers of the 2018 season

#2 Tai Tzu Ying

Is there any shot, any court, any tournament that the wondrous Tai Tzu Ying has no answer to? The Chinese Taipei girl never fails to leave spectators spellbound with her breathtaking deceptive strokes that only she can come up with.

And that is why, most of the time her opponents are left scratching their heads when they face the magic of Tai. The 24-year-old simply picked up from where she left last year and even outdid her 2017 season.

It needs to be mentioned here that she did not have the best of starts to the season and suffered a loss in her very first final of the year at the Malaysia Masters. But that slip in Bukit Jalil was only an anomaly which she proved the very next week when she beat Saina Nehwal to win the Indonesia Masters.

Thus began her march and it continued through the All England Open, Badminton Asia Championships, Uber Cup, Malaysia Open, Indonesia Open, finally ending in the quarter-finals of the World Championships to He Bingjiao.

By then, she had accumulated 31 wins in a row, breaking Li Xuerui’s record of winning 30 consecutive matches.

After that stutter, she simply brushed it off and resumed her title hunt once more, sweeping the Asian Games gold, Chinese Taipei Open, Denmark Open until injury reared its ugly head and interrupted her run.

Tai’s exploits in 2018 gave her eight titles and two runner-up finishes.