(By Steve Hopkins)
In a tournament where the top four seeds lost early, it only makes sense that sixth seed Anton Kallberg would add one more upset to the event as he overcame the fifth seed Patrick Franziska in the Final of Men’s Singles at the WTT Contender Tunis. Anton Kallberg dominated Mattias Falck 3-1 to reach the Final, but overcoming Franziska would mean defeating someone who had won two of the most recent three meetings, and who had dominated all of the past years of matches. These two routinely face each other as both are on contending squads in the German League, but Kallberg is only 25 and he has been steadily improving. To provide an idea of how evenly matched they are, Kallberg’s four wins in the match today were 17-15, 11-7, 14-12, and 11-9. That is, the game scores were much closer than the 4-1 Kallberg win.
It is hard for Miwa Harimoto to surprise anyone, as she has been turning heads since her head was barely the height of the table, but Japan’s 15 year old phenom reannounced her presence today with a 4-2 win over Korea’s Shin Yubin. Yubin has been on fire, and she won the WTT event in Lagos just a week ago. But Harimoto had a very strong tournament with wins over World No. 30 Miyu Nagasaki and World No. 16 Yubin. Harimoto is current the foifth ranked Japanese player, but these results should move her into fourth (with an eye on catching up to Miyuu Kihara in third position later this year).
In women’s doubles it was India’s Sutirtha Mukherjee and Ayhika Mukerjee beating the Korean top seeds in the Semifinals (Yubin/Jihee) and overcoming the Japanese second seed in the Final (Kihara/Harimoto). The mixed doubles title went to Taipei’s Lin Yun-Ju and Chen Szu-Yu. Men’s Doubles went to Park/Jang in an all-Korea final.
WTT action next moves to Zagreb where another in the WTT Contender series is scheduled to start tomorrow and continue through the weekend.
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