Table Tennis News & Videos
Share
Oct. 17th | Oct. 18th | Oct. 19th | Oct 20th | Oct 21st
Courtesy of Butterfly.tt
Richard Prause: 10/19/2012
"A plea for the coaches"
Dear Table tennis lovers!
I would like to start today’s report from European Championships in Herning with a side step to Shanghai. On 24th and 25th of November the prestigious duel between China and the rest of the world is going to take place.
First time in the history of our sport both teams have to play without coaches. To me this is very critical and I wish to strike a blow for my colleagues. Without good coaches there is no education and furthermore a tactical analysis is hardly possible.
Quite similarly, also here in Herning I can see how much devotion and passion the coaches contribute. Sometimes the coaches even suffer more from defeats than the participants do. I can only hope that this trend does not continue and there will be no further limitation on their work. They have to remain (a very important) part of World and European Championships.
This takes us to Herning finally.
The qualification rounds are finished and as kind of a surprise the singles were played best of five and not best of seven. This of course meant some additional pressure on the favorite players in the respective matches. However, the ‘Big ones’ within the qualification made their way into main round. Even it Patrick Franziska (against the young Englishman Daniel Reed) suffered surprising defeat, he took this hurdle same as Pär Gerell and Jean Michel Saive did.
Firstly, Routiniers like Saive and also Petr Korbel have proved that they can still perform on very remarkable level. Second, I really much enjoyed the match between the youngsters Quentin Robinot and Liam Pitchford. Both of them have nice talent and will surely will generate a buzz in the future. Pity that only one of them could (namingly Pitchford) could qualify for the best 64. I would have loved to see both of them play some more matches here. They will get their chances again and again.
Best regards
Richard Prause
