The Qatar Platinum leg Open, which took place in mid-May this year, was presented in a somewhat deserted manner.
In terms of men's singles, Wang Chao and Fan Xiaodong, the two super rising stars of Huaping who have attracted much attention and controversy from the outside world, did not participate in the competition. The main players sent by Huaping were Xiao Fei, Luo Jiu, Bai Feng, and Lin Li.
On the surface, four of the five main players of Huaping have gone, all except the world number one Sun Tianlong. They seem to be very aggressive, but in fact, the situation has changed over the past year, and the original five main players have long existed in name only. Lin Li Bai Feng Xiao Fei has been losing consecutively, and the world ranking has been falling, so this time Huaping's default player is Luo Jiu, and the other three are escort wingmen, just like Flying Sand Combination and Underworld Combination escort Tang Dynasty Combination.
But what the outside world doesn't know is that Cai Guodong has another idea: he wants to take a serious look at the current winning-loss relationship and how big the gap between the five main players is.
This is related to the ranking of players within Huaping.
Yes, you guessed it right, before Olympic Games arrives, the head coach wants to rearrange the seats and select the new five main players.
This year, three major table tennis events were organized within one year, which coincided with the internal competition for power within Huaping. Non-Chinese associations also had super new stars emerging in large numbers. It can be regarded as a truly troubled time. As the saying goes, you must first settle the internal affairs before going outside. Naturally, Cai Guodong wanted to take advantage of the chaos to sort out the internal situation.
Therefore, he hopes that Qatar Open will have more civil war this time. He hopes to see Luo Jiu defeat the other three generals to prove his status as a twin star. He also hopes that one of the three generals will rise up and suppress Luo Jiu again.
He is not afraid of accidents, because Luo Jiu has already proven his strength, so if someone can really suppress Luo Jiu again, it only means that the other three of the five main players have also undergone super evolution.
If he could choose, he would like this person to be Bai Feng.
Not only because Bai Feng is the youngest and has the most stamina, but also because Bai Feng bears the name of World's Number One Penholder and has the advanced technology of Penhold Backhand Loop. The founder and master of the art, theoretically speaking, the upper limit of Bai Feng is very high, not even lower than Sun Tianlong Luo Jiu and Wang Chao.
Coach Wang Lu naturally guessed the intention of Cai Guodong. This time he led the team to Qatar. Before leaving, his face was extremely serious. He obviously understood that this was one of the few last opportunities for his beloved disciple Bai Feng.
If Bai Feng continues to insist on his reckless style and refuses to put down his body and learn to play with his head, then by the end of this year, Bai Feng may officially leave the main team.
Internal competition in the national team always exists, so what Coach Wang Lu is targeting at this moment is not Wang Chao and Fan Xiaodong who will surely compete for power in the future, but Lin Li and Xiao Fei who are at the same level as Bai Feng.
Among the top five players, Wang Chao and Fan Xiaodong can take up two positions at most, followed by Lu Feiyang Sun Zhongwen Liang Kunpeng and others don't seem to be a big threat, so Bai Feng only needs to perform better than Lin Li and Xiao Fei this time on Qatar Open.
Taking a step back, in fact, it is enough to perform better than Xiao Fei.
This is partly because Xiao Fei is very Buddhist and doesn't have much desire to win, and partly because Sun Tianlong will definitely retire next year, which leaves one more spot.
In the end, the five-day Qatar Open was completed, and Wang Lu was quite satisfied.
As expected, Huaping had a continuous civil war in the main match. Luo Jiu met Lin Li, and Bai Feng met Xiao Fei as Coach Wang Lu wished., then Luo Jiu and Bai Feng entered the finals hand in hand, staged the third round of the Chinese table tennis civil war, Luo Jiu finally succeeded in winning the championship, crushing Bai Feng 4:0.
This time European associations collectively lost their voice.
It's not that Huaping suddenly achieved great success due to genetic mutation, but it's just a coincidence that this time in Qatar and Europe, Hook Pike Bayer Morad Sissifield all did not sign up.
On the Asian side, Lin Zijun Zhang Benkuang Mizutori Hato also did not sign up.
Hook did not sign up because he was busy dealing with the final club league affairs and planned to play Table Tennis Super League in the second half of the year. He has successfully contacted Jiangcheng University Club through Wang Chao. This matter is completely different to Jiangcheng University Team. It was pie in the sky. They were at first inexplicably surprised, thinking they had met an international scammer. Then they confirmed through multiple sources and found that the matter was true, so they began to ask about the whole story. Then, the boss behind Jiangcheng University Team made a direct call to the office of Spade Q boss Fan Xiaofan.
It is not known what they talked about specifically. I only know that Fan Xiaofan was very happy when he walked out of the office that day, brushing away the bad luck caused by the club's consecutive losses in recent days.
As for Pike, who did not sign up, he is naturally still practicing hard in seclusion, vowing to perfect his already powerful backhand skills and turn them into unique and exclusive skills again.
As for Bayer, he is old and injured again.
There is also Swedish star Morad, who was suspended for several months because he smashed his racket at the game last month.
Sissifield is very lively and came to the Qatar competition, but unfortunately, this time he only signed up for mixed doubles.
So in the end, the four main players of Huaping fought fiercely and found that Europe sent a single seedling of Michel.
In the end, this single seedling fell into the hands of Buddha-like player Xiao Fei.
This is also a bad fate for Michel.
After receiving the technical training from Old Wa, he has actually played very well. Not only is his forehand more delicate than most European players, but his offensive ability on the forehand and backhand is also extremely powerful. If he met Bai Feng or Lin Li, he would actually have a chance to win, but he met Xiao Fei.
Xiao Fei belongs to the Buddhist system. Ranking second in the world for many years is no joke. His rhythm is slow. The problem is that Michel is not fast either, so Xiao Fei's weaknesses were covered up when facing Michel.
The current Michel forehand ball is delicate, but the Xiao Fei is even thinner than it.
Michel's attack board is of extremely high quality. However, as mentioned before, Great Python Turn's forehand killing board of Xiao Fei is both strange and powerful. It can be said to be a unique skill. Huaping's unique skill once again defeated Michel from the forehand.
In the end, Michel only made it to the top eight.
On the Asian side, Lin Zijun and Zhang Benkuang did not sign up because, like Sissifield, they had already sprinted to the mixed doubles track.
These two young supernovas were originally very ambitious when they debuted last year, vowing to defeat Huaping and slay the dragon to achieve enlightenment. However, one year later, they were beaten to pieces by Sun Tianlong Luo Jiu and Wang Chao. Now they are no longer as ambitious as they used to be. Instead, they have become heroes who understand current affairs and directly choose to avoid them.
You can compete on the singles track, but I will take the lead on the mixed doubles track.
Needless to say, Mizutori Hato will never appear in the singles arena at the same open tournament as Luo Jiu.
But he came anyway because he signed up for mixed doubles.
So this time Men's Singles actually doesn't have much to watch. Even though the quality of the game is very high, the audience obviously prefers to watch the grudge and stalemate games rather than the unilateral crushing games.
So the focus this time is actually on mixed doubles.
After all, in this parallel world, this is the first time that mixed doubles has officially entered the list of events on the professional tour. Everyone is curious about what kind of debut Huaping will give on this new track, and whether it will have such desperate dominance.
Zhang Benkuang and Yamano Mia, Ichikawa Mima and Mizutori Hato, Lin Zijun and Zhen Jing, Weng Chunting and Ai Qin, Zhu Shixian and Xu Xiaoyuan, these five pairs are all aggressive.
There are several pairs in Europe, but in the end, the only ones that can really be seen are Germany's Sissifield and Solga.
Facts have proved that mixed doubles is a competition between Asian countries. The root cause of this is that Europe does not pay too much attention to women's table tennis, so it naturally suffers in mixed doubles.
In the end, Xiao Fei and Liu Wen won the Qatar Open mixed doubles championship without any danger, which was also the first mixed doubles gold medal in the history of the Open.
Judging from the results, Huaping has comprehensive coverage and no regrets.
But from the content point of view, Cai Guodong is not satisfied.
Because of the mixed doubles championship, there were quite a few dangers.
After the Qatar Open match, table tennis associations around the world also agreed that China Table Tennis does not have an absolute advantage in mixed doubles. In the future, it will have a very good chance of overtaking in corners. Even European countries are temporarily planning to increase their investment and invest more energy and money in mixed doubles.
Looking specifically at the game process, when 16 advanced to 8, Scarlet Gossip Combination was directly defeated by the Lin Zijun Zhen Jing combination that was paired for the first time for two consecutive games, and then stabilized and began to pursue the pursuit, and finally won 4:2.
This game made everyone discover that Scarlet Gossip Combination, a pair of veterans, has a fatal weakness: the start is too slow, and the overall speed and rhythm are slow, which is in sharp contrast to Taiwan Island Combination's ultra-fast-paced play style.
Their victory was entirely due to the suppression of personal strength, as well as game experience and details.
When 8 advanced to 4, Scarlet Gossip Combination directly played with Zhang Benkuang Yamano Mia in the decisive game. After winning, the two of them broke into a cold sweat.
This time their weaknesses are more obvious. They still lack rhythm and speed. In the past, their playing style has always been that Liu Wen is responsible for accelerating, and Xiao Fei is responsible for decelerating. This combination of speed and slowness, as long as they cooperate They have enough tacit understanding that they can adapt to opponents who are slightly faster or slower than them. But the problem is that this time Zhang Benkuang and Yamano Mia played too fast, and they have reached the point of sacrificing quality in pursuit of speed.
This style of play is obviously an eccentric approach, not a royal approach, but there is no doubt that it made Scarlet Gossip Combination a little confused and almost lost his hold.
During the review after the game, the Huaping coaching staff unanimously believed that the playing styles of Zhang Benkuang and Yamano Mia were correct for them.
After all, Zhang Benkuang is still underage. His body is thin and his strength is insufficient. He himself cannot hit the kill board. If he doesn't take the speed route, should he force himself to take the quality route?
Yamano Mia, on the other hand, plays an extreme speed style in singles, and her performance in mixed doubles is just her true self.
After this game, Scarlet Gossip Combination's game mentality changed drastically. He began to race against time to train and discuss tactics, and analyzed the game videos of other combinations in the past few days with the coaches. They stepped down from the high altar, put down their status as the world's number one mixed doubles player, and treated their subsequent opponents as bosses who were equal to or even stronger than themselves.
But even so, they faced Ichikawa Mima and Mizutori Hato in the finals and still reached the deciding game again.
Wang Chao watched this game with other team members in the dormitory of the national team training base.
Initially, Ichikawa Mima and Mizutori Hato showed obvious discomfort in the game. Although they had practiced a lot and studied a lot of tactics, they were not as experienced as their old partners like Scarlet Gossip Combination. Moreover, it was their first time playing mixed doubles in an official arena, and it was also their first time encountering such a strong opponent, so they were a little confused at the beginning.
This confusion lasted for two games, and Scarlet Gossip Combination beat him to a 2:0 lead in one breath.
At this time, the players watching the game in the dormitory already felt that the overall situation was decided, but Wang Chao did not dare to take it lightly.
Because he always remembers that in the Olympic Games mixed doubles competition in the previous life, that final became a regrettable match for China Table Tennis Team. The Chinese Table Tennis Team lost after winning two games first.
And that match happened to be between the old and young combination of China Table Tennis Team Sakura Country.
It was as if there was some kind of mysterious force that would make the story repeat itself. Wang Chao watched helplessly as Ichikawa Mima and Mizutori Hato started to buck the trend and break out from behind by two games. They suddenly regained 3 games from Gossip and took a 3:2 lead.
This scene made everyone in the dormitory fall silent, and no one was talking, laughing or joking anymore.
Then Scarlet Gossip Combination broke the boat, started fighting, and regained a game. The score became 3:3 and entered the decisive game.
Wang Chao has always believed that he has a great mentality. In his previous life, he was a coach and provided off-field guidance. No matter what desperate situation his players were in, he would never panic, let alone take quick-acting life-saving pills. He always used his precise vision in key games to help his players turn defeat into victory and create miracles.
But at this moment he was still a little panicked.
Because the entire direction of the ball was exactly the same as the ball in his previous life Olympic Games.
They win two games first, then lose three games and then regain one game.
This made him wonder if there was really some invisible force that dominated everything, causing the same plot to repeat itself in different time and space.
In the previous life, it was the Chinese Ping Ping team whose ball collapsed in the last game.
Will it be the same this time?
Wang Chao looked down with anxiety until the end, and finally let out a long breath.
won.
Scarlet Gossip Combination played perfectly in the last game. They should be steady and fight. Their playing style was generally lagging behind, but in terms of coordination, details, experience, and mentality, they were completely ahead. So in the end, they finally ushered in an ending that was different from Wang Chao's previous life, relying on backward compatible backward methods to win the final battle.
Huaping got its first mixed doubles gold medal in the Open.
But it is far from being taken lightly, because this is just a training exercise.
Huaping's ultimate goal is to win Olympic Games's first mixed doubles gold medal.
Thanks to "Menphisto" for the 1500 coin reward.
Thanks to "Haiziyuan" for the 500 coin reward.