Alwi Farhan Spars With Kento Momota in Final Camp Before Asian Games 2026

On a morning in an arena in eastern Tokyo, the stands had long ago had their bench rows removed, leaving only bare steel frames. Kento Momota stood at the net, racket in his left hand, waiting. Alwi Farhan served. The rally ran eighteen shots, then twenty, then twenty-seven. Nobody shouted. There was no scoreboard. Only the sound of rubber soles on the wooden floor, beating out a very steady rhythm — the rhythm I have heard across sixteen years in this trade: the rhythm of someone learning how to endure.

I watched that clip on my phone, in an apartment in Jakarta. The sofa taught me that an empty stadium still has applause. In a training hall without spectators, there are still real matches.

Alwi Farhan, Indonesia's men's singles player, is in his final camp in Japan before the Asian Games Aichi-Nagoya 2026. According to information from PBSI, the Badminton Association of Indonesia, this is the sprint phase. That programme included a sparring session with Kento Momota, the Japanese former world number one, now retired.

It was a sparring session, not an official match. No ranking points, no seeding, no result entered into the BWF system.

Indonesian badminton has an odd structure. Its traditional strength lies in doubles, while men's singles is ground that must be re-tilled every cycle. The Ginting and Christie generation has carried this lane for years, and the question the coaching staff must answer is not who wins this week, but who will still be standing in the quarter-finals four years from now.

The Asian Games is a continental multi-sport event, held every four years. For badminton, it sits outside the BWF World Tour system. Its value is medals and national honour — something that does not convert into ranking points. That is why federations prepare for it differently: long centralised camps, overseas bases, deliberately chosen sparring partners.

Taking the squad to Tokyo at the final stage is an expensive choice. Japan has a training resource few places can match: a pool of high-level players who have retired but retained their feel for the shuttle. Momota is in that group. He no longer competes, but his defensive coverage, his retrieval and his patience within each rally remain intact — three things a young attacking player needs to be tested against.

In badminton there are two distinct kinds of training. One is training with someone stronger, to learn how to win. The other is training with someone who never loses the shuttle, to learn how to lose more slowly. A young player moving from junior to senior level usually wins through speed and power. Opponents at continental level no longer hand over free points through speed — they force a young player to hit two or three more shots before reaching the finishing point. Whoever lacks that second gear breaks.

The value of a Momota-style sparring session lies not in new technique but in the threshold of endurance: it forces a young player to live inside rallies longer than he wants.

I recognised this back when I was commentating junior matches at Vidio. Players of eighteen and nineteen often win the first game on strength, then lose the second and third on the very haste that strength creates. Good coaches do not teach them to hit harder. They teach them when not to hit hard.

Alwi is exactly at that age. Indonesian media reported that he has just won the Australia Open 2026 — a Super 500-level title under the BWF system. I say "under the BWF system" because this is a fact carried by a related report, not the body of the original story about the training session, and I have no independent source to cross-check it.

If that title is real, it means a player in transition has won a mid-tier World Tour event. It does not mean he is ready for an Asian Games quarter-final. Those two things sit quite far apart.

What interests me more is the structure of the trip. A federation sending an athlete abroad, placing him opposite a world-class sparring partner, and calling this the final stage — that is a signal about internal expectations. A place in the final camp before a major Games is not handed out automatically. It is a vote.

Technically, a session with Momota affects three things. Shuttle quality coming back: Momota returns deep and tight to the lines, forcing his opponent to generate power from bad positions. Net management: a good net controller forces the attacking player to decide faster in the first two shots. And mental stamina — the kind that only appears when you know you are about to lose and still have to hit five more shots.

But there is a gap in this story I do not want to skip over. The headline says he "got a lesson from Kento Momota". Alwi's quotes, per PBSI, speak only of the honour and the joy of hitting with someone he used to watch on television. There is not a single technical detail: no shot adjusted, nothing on tactics, not one number.

The distance between the headline and the content is not small. It is the mark of an emotion-driven story, issued by the federation itself. Information supplied by a federation has a characteristic: always positive, always edited, and rarely about the hard part.

A rally has three truths: the player's, the umpire's, and the spectator's. With this story, we only have a fourth version — the spokesperson's.

The person holding the microphone does not judge; he only aims the lamp at the rally. The lamp here shows a real training session, but the "lesson" itself is not yet visible to anyone. Indonesian fans have every right to be excited. My job is to point out that the excitement is running ahead of the data.

There is a recurring pattern in Southeast Asian badminton: a young player wins a mid-tier event, the media builds him into "the next star", and then at his first major he loses in the second round to a name nobody mentioned. Not because he is weak. Because the pressure of a multi-sport Games is nothing like the pressure of a World Tour stop. There is an athletes' village, a multi-day schedule, and an entire country standing behind him.

The variable to watch is not the Tokyo training session. It is the first two matches at Aichi-Nagoya: how Alwi handles the second phase of a rally when the opponent will not let him play the way he wants. If he can extend rallies without losing composure, the Momota session has paid its interest. If he cannot, the lesson is still waiting ahead.

From Jakarta, I keep following every training session these young players put in. A player does not grow up where the stands are full. He grows up on mornings nobody is watching.