Crackling Danes give Europe its only title

Once again the match of the day, and possibly of the week, was the men's doubles. The ambience crackled, the rallies were often a blur, and the outcome, in which a nation of a mere five million people won another of imany All-England titles, was a bit of a fairytale.

Denmark has a long history of great deeds in this tournament and Mathias Boe and Carsten Mogensen added spectacularly to them.

Last year they had four match points in the final but couldn't get over the line. This time they not only achieved atonement, they managed one with a fantastic twist.
Boe and Mogensen were a game and 11-14 down to Koo Kien Keat and Tan Boon Heong, the former world number one pair from Malaysia, and then 17-18 down before levelling at a game all.

They were in even bigger trouble in the final game - 11-16 down, apparently being outsmarted by a pair who had won a sensational match the previous day against Cai Yun and Fu Haifeng, China's world champions.

Faced with these deficits, Boe and Mogensen each time made amazing fightbacks - though nothing was quite as remarkable as their final surge.

This brought them six points up to 17-16, two more points from 17-17 to 19-17, and two more from 19-18 to the finish, and during these phases they began to look unstoppable.

Boe was outstanding at the net, and once Mogensen start to get smashes downwards from the back, the nimble left-hander picked off any suspect returns with kill after kill in the forecourt.

The Malaysians had previously had a phase where they tried to initiate flat mid-court rallies and little net exchanges, and sometimes that worked.
But having been in the driving seat for so much of the match they lost their tactical way. And as the match boiled up to its hectic finish, the Danish adrenaline was so high it was impossible to resist.

"Losing like that last year was a big disappointment, and to come back this way – well it's such a fantastic feeling," said Mogensen.

It certainly looked appeared so, for at the end the Danes darted around in circles as though chasing mosquitos and then rolled to the ground where they lay like corpses.

"It's unbelievable. You can't describe the feeling. You should try it for yourself," Mogensen said.

By contrast the women's doubles was an anti-climax, except perhaps for China's Yu Yang who won the title last year with Du Jing and came back to retain it, with a new partner, Wang Xiaoli.

They overwhelmed Mizuki Fujii and Reika Kakiiwa 21-2, 21-9 and look as though they may well go on to prove themselves the best combo in the world.
The Japanese came through in the half in which their compatriots Miyyuki Maeda and Satoko Suetsana had been seeded to reach the final, but started nervously and were never allowed to settle.

But they had achieved something which had not been done by anyone from their nation in more than 30 years, and got a great hand when they received their medal.

No Thai player had reached an All-England final for almost 50 years; Sudket Prapakamol and Saralee Thoungthongkam found this piece of history hard to live up to in the mixed doubles as well.

They were beaten 21-13, 21-9 by Xu Chen and Ma Jin, which gave China its third title, and the result never looked in doubt.
Saralee once headed the shuttle back over the net in comic frustration at her inability to hit it where she wished, and Sudket, who had been so good in the quarter-final defeat of Tao Jiaming and Tian Qing, the fifth-seeded Chinese pair, could not replicate his best form either.

Sudket also brought the match to a bizarre finish, not attempting to strike Ma Lin's low serve on match point at all, but letting it land in, already walking towards the net to shake hands as he did so.

Ma meanwhile looked well pleased with the steep smashes and threatening presence of the tall Xu. Well she might: her partnership with him could go on to be as good as the one with Zheng Bo with which she won the world title in Paris last August.