(by Steve Hopkins, photo WTT)
The world’s best converged on Macao for the ITTF Men’s & Women’s World Cup, and going into Sunday’s Semifinals and Finals, the biggest stories were the upsets and surprises. On Sunday, the script turned back to the “norm” as a pair of World No. 1’s finished strong to reaffirm their positions at the top.
In Men’s Singles, the early Semifinal match was between Lin Yun-Ju and Sora Matsushima. Both Matsushima and Yun-Ju have played great in recent events, so no one was surprised one or the other made a deep run. The unexpected result is that both toppled top seeds in the Quarters (Yun-Ju over Harimoto, and Matsushima over Moregard) so both reached a Semifinal to face each other. The match was tight throughout with Matsushima winning the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 7th games on way to a 4-3 victory.
In the second Semifinal, Wang Chuqin and Hugo Calderano faced off in a rematch of last year’s Semifinals at this same event. A year ago, Calderano surprised the world with a 4-3 Semifinals win on his way to taking the title, this year, it was Chuqin with a dominant 4-1 win (on his way to claiming the title). In the Final, Wang Chuqin defeated Sora Matsushima 4-3. Six of the seven games played were decided by 2 or 3 points. In fact, the difference may have been an 18-16 marathon win by Chuqin in the second game that kept Matsushima from going up 2-0.
The main story of the Women’s draw through the Quarterfinals was how well Hana Goda, Sabine Winter, Shin Yubin, and Honoka Hashimoto had performed. The main story through the Semifinals was how Sabine Winter was the first European to reach the Semis and how Shin Yubin was the first from the Korea Republic to reach that round. Sunday’s script snapped back to focusing on the top seeds. World No. 1 Sun Yingsha logged a 4-0 Semifinal win over Winter, and World No. 2 logged a 4-2 win over Shin Yubin. The two top players in the world then played a lopsided match with close game scores that resulted in Sun Yingsha winning 4-1. So despite all of the talk of upsets and “firsts”, the last match was World No. 1 over World No. 2.
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