After the first point ended, Fan Xiaodong's true strategy finally surfaced.
What he wanted this game was not offense, but defense.
The reasoning was simple: it was certainly hard for him to put Wang Chao away, but was Wang Chao really going to put him away that easily?
His coach, Qin Huachang, had told him that if he wanted to defeat Wang Chao, first, he had to conceal his feel for the ball and ambush him; second, he had to seize on Wang Chao's weakness of insufficient power and play defensively against him.
So when he played Hook yesterday, the reason he had started by testing out defense was not merely to give Qin Huachang an explanation. He had also been preparing to deal with Wang Chao.
And when Wang Chao had been racking his brains over how to play Hook, wasn't he also trying to figure out how to play Fan Xiaodong?
After all, Hook and Fan Xiaodong actually had rather similar styles.
All that could be said was that while Hook was a sufficiently formidable roadblock, he had never truly been the final opponent in either man's mind from the very beginning.
Hook's foundation was weak. His strength was only temporary, whereas Wang Chao and Fan Xiaodong had both built perfect foundations. They would only grow stronger and stronger.
In fact, for generation after generation of Chinese table tennis Great Demon Kings, the stumbling blocks on their paths to the Grand Slam had always been their own teammates, rather than players from non-Chinese associations.
In the era of the Two Wangs and One Ma before Wang Chao's transmigration, Chinese table tennis had been flourishing beyond measure. Wang Chao still remembered that the International Table Tennis Federation had even organized an invitational event called World Table Tennis versus Chinese