(by Steve Hopkins)
USA’s Kanak Jha was one of four players to start the German League season 2-0. Joining Jha as a key player winning two sets in the team’s first match were Anders Lind of Borussia Dortmund, Benedict Duda of Schwalbe Bergneustadt, and Steffen Mengel of Muhlhausen.
Kanak Jha has joined a new team this year, filling a slot left by retired legend Timo Boll at storied franchise Borussia Dusseldorf. Dusseldorf faced RhonSprudel Fulda-Maberzell in their season opener. Dusseldorf’s Dang Qiu won the first match against Jonathan Groth 3-0, and Kanak Jha added a 3-0 victory of his own over Fan Bo Meng – giving their squad a 2-0 lead. Fulda’s anchor, Dimitrij Ovtcharov then won a narrow victory (3-2) over Yongyin Li. Jha then shut the door with a 31 win over Jonathan Groth. A dominant win for Dusseldorf to start the season – and they were missing Anton Kallberg in the lineup.
In the other early matches, Muhlhausen topped Grunwettersbach 3-1 (Mengel won twice and Freitas added the third point), Dortmund topped Ochsenhausen (Lind won twice and Kristian Karlsson added the third point), Bremen defeated Bad Homburg 3-2 in a match decided in doubles (Bremen has Falck and Gerasimenko as its anchors), and Grenzau topped Bad Konigshofen 3-1 in a match between two teams with lesser-known players.
The last of the opening matches was featured by scheduling it as the only match on Sunday. The reason was the debut of former World No. 1 Fan Zhendong as a new player for defending champion Saarbrucken – the first time a top Chinese player has joined a German League team. The Saarbrucken lineup for today’s match was Fan Zhendong, Darko Jorgic, and Eduard Ionescu, and on paper they held a significant advantage over Schwalbe Bergneustadt’s Benedict Duda, Romain Ruiz, and Adrien Rassenfosse. The carefully choreographed “soft” matchup was intended to launch Saarbrucken on a path as the season favorite – perhaps someone forgot to give the script to Schwalbe.
Fan Zhendong lost the first game against Romain Ruiz 11-13, and then quickly won the next two games. Ruiz, however, wasn’t done – has he pounded Fan 11-5 and 11-6 in the final two games. Benedict Duda then defeated Ionescu 3-1 to give Schwalbe a 2-0 advantage. Jorgic then put Saarbrucken on the scoreboard with a solid 3-0 win. And then it was Fan again dropping the first game in the match against Benedict Duda – before losing 3-1 (with the final two games not even close at 11-5 and 11-3). Schwalbe opens the season with a big upset win – and the fanfare for a dominant Saarbrucken will need to wait (its a long season, there will be time for momentum to shift). Perhaps we’ll hear later about an injury – or perhaps Fan is having a tough transition from his highly regimented regime in China to a very different environment in Saarland along the Germany/French border, not too far from Luxembourg. That said, the biggest story of the first week of that TTBL is that Fan Zhendong (who is 13-0 in the current Chinese Super League) has started 0-2 in Germany.
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