(by Steve Hopkins, photo WTT)
There was a competitive draw in place this week at the WTT Feeder Series event in Vila Nova de Gaia, Portugal. Freitas and Kao and Geraldo and Karlsson were the top four seeds, but only Marcos Freitas reached the Final Four. In fact, the biggest prize didn’t go to a seeded player at all – rather it was Germany’s Steffen Mengel who fought through the qualifiers just to reach the draw – and dominated with 3-0 or 3-1 wins throughout.
Marcos Freitas started strong logging a 3-0 win over Puerto Rico’s Daniel Gonzalez, a 3-0 win over Park Ganghyeon of Korea, and a 3-1 win over China’s Zhou Kai. But Freitas was pushed to the fifth game on Friday, winning 3-2 over France’s Jules Rolland before falling in the Semis to Mengel. The other two top seeds in that half of the draw were Joao Gerald who fell to Mengel in the Round of 16, and Tiago Apolonia who fell to Mengel in the Quarters. USA’s Sid Naresh made the main draw, but fell to Korea’s Park Ganghyeon in the Round of 64. Angel Naranjo won his opening match (a 3-2 win over China’s Cao Wei) before falling to another Chinese player in the in the Round of 32 (a 2-3 loss to Niu Guankai).
The Semifinalists in the bottom half of the draw were Kazuhiro Yoshimura, who had a series of upsets including wins over over Lubomir Pistej and Kristian Karlsson. Yoshimura fell to An Jaehyun 3-2. Jaehyun and Mengel had a tight Final with three of the four games decided by just 2 points, but after Jaehyun won the first game Mengel ran off three in a row to take the title.
The next tour stop is the WTT Feeder in Dusseldorf that starts on Monday.
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