Gabby Adcock admits it is back to the drawing board for her and husband Chris after their quarter-final exit at the Yonex All England Open Badminton Championships.
The Adcock were bidding for a place in the last four of the mixed doubles draw in Birmingham against Chinese No.1 seeds Zhang Nan and Zhao Yunlei.
It was an elementary first game for the Chinese Olympic champions from London 2012 as they blew the Adcocks out of the water to win 21-10.
The English pair threatened to come to life early in the second game and stormed back from 7-4 down to take the lead at the NIA in the West Midlands.
But the No.5 seeds were unable to sustain their momentum and Zhang and Zhao came roaring back to win 21-13 leaving Gabby frustrated at their performance.
“First we need to go back and figure out what we are going to do to push to that next stage of our career,” she said. “I think it is really important when you play that pair that you don’t give them the confidence from the start.
“And I think we pretty much did give them the confidence that they needed right from the start. We spoke about trying not to do that in the morning so we are pretty disappointed that we did that.
“We were 11-6 down and six of them were errors. We tried to cut out the errors and move our feet and get into it a bit more but unfortunately we needed to do that from the start.
“I felt like when we went up that that was how we can play and how we needed to play to beat them. Obviously we are always going to fight and try and find that rhythm.
“And we did for a patch and then we went back to making errors again so against the world No.1s we can’t afford to do that.”
But despite the loss Gabby believes they can find some positives in their loss as they turn their attentions quickly onto next week’s Swiss Open.
“We’re always taking away a lot from matches and from this hall,” she said. “They defended really well and our attack didn’t really match them at all.
“We’ve got the Swiss Open next so our attentions are on that and we want to come back from this and do well there.”
© Sportsbeat 2014
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