“MY GOD! Do you actually want me to start crying?” Susan Hughes is smarting because old wounds are still raw. There are so many memories from the 2002 Commonwealth Games that she cherishes, but this is not one of them. It’s the one that counts, though. This is the one that will send her to Melbourne on a mission.

Manchester — Hughes is 19. A year since she became the youngest ever Scottish national champion, yet here she is serving match point for a bronze in the badminton singles. Across the net is England’s Tracey Hallam, eight years senior, who has clawed back a two-set lead. “She was more experienced in situations like that than I was,” says Hughes, recalling the outline of the point (“she won it more than I lost”) and the next two that put her out just short of a double bronze in her first Games.

Hughes played singles during the team competition, an event that gave Scotland an unexpected bronze medal, which was a phenomenal result. She outlasted every other Scot in singles competition, surpassed all but her wildest imaginings of success in Manchester but got so close to the impossible that it still hurts. She isn’t crying, though. She remembers it with a smile. “It happens. Everything happens for a reason, right? Who knows how I would have progressed if I’d won a medal then.

“Manchester was the first time I had been competitive at that level. Before that I thought I was one of the best in Scotland and that was pretty good, but after, I thought I could keep up with these players at that level.”

This is an obstacle on Hughes’s journey. The majority of ‘these players’, the ones who will let her find out how good she can be, do not frequent the national badminton academy in Glasgow, where Hughes is seated. Only Yuan Wemyss matches up to Hughes on her own patch. Wemyss, 30, has been at the top in Scotland since the national coach, Dan Travers, convinced the Chinese-born athlete to join the squad five years ago after she had settled in Dumfries. Hughes has used her teammate as a benchmark and appears ready to set her sights higher still. Wemyss, at No19 in the world rankings, is five places higher than Hughes, but in their competitive meetings last season Hughes came out on top, including two all-Scottish finals in European tour events, the Iceland Open and the Finland Open.

When they are not playing each other, Scotland’s top two practise against men, “but it’s not the same,” according to Hughes, who is working on ways to increase her court time against better players. She hopes to convince some to travel to Scotland for sparring, while she has recently gone to the training camp of the England squad in Milton Keynes. Last season she represented Team Aarhus in the Danish league. “It is different in Denmark, the best people still play at club level and it was a really high standard,” she says. “I was playing the No3 in the world, or the No10 in the world in club matches. If you haven’t played anyone like that for six months it is such a huge jump, a real shock to the system, but I was doing that all of the time.”

To appreciate this search for the best opponents, you need to know that Hughes’s six trips to Scandinavia and countless more worldwide for international matches and European tour events interrupted her studies at the University of Stirling, a supremely patient alma mater that has permitted Hughes to take her psychology degree into its sixth year.

Hughes began the new season with a run to the semi-finals at the Belgian Open that confirmed she is heading in the right direction. “In itself that is not particularly great,” she says, “but I lost to Xu Huaiwen, the No6 in the world, who won a bronze medal at the world championships. I played probably the best I have ever played. I don’t think anyone else took more than three or four points off her and I took her to three sets. That was the first time against someone who is truly world class that I have been in with a shout.” It convinced Hughes to focus her game on the top-ranking International Badminton Federation events this year.

And so the plan has Hughes at Melbourne three-quarters of the way through a season spent mixing it with the very best. She will not be the unknown quantity she was in Manchester, but she will have that experience behind her, should she come within a point of a medal again. “There are more contenders than there were in Manchester,” she says. “I’m miles better than I was, but last time there were maybe three players that could win it, this time there are about eight.

And I’m not going so I can say that I’ve been to another Commonwealth Games, I‘m trying do something.”