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Match winner Benedikt Duda
Photo:
IMAGO/Liu Xu/ IMAGO/Xinhua
The German men's table tennis national team is surprisingly in the final of the Team World Championships in China.
A day after catching up with France, Dang Qiu, Benedikt Duda and Kay Stumper also won the semi-final against South Korea 3-2 on Saturday.
After a total playing time of more than three and a half hours, the 28-year-old Duda finally defeated the former World Cup bronze medalist An Jaehyun in the decisive fifth game in 3:2 sets.
Opponents on Sunday (1.30pm CET) in Chengdu are, as expected, China, who beat Japan 3-2.
»The team was great today.
We fought like crazy," said Duda, who had already won the decisive match 3-2 in the quarter-finals.
The world number 36.
from the Bundesliga club TTC Schwalbe Bergneustadt gave the team of national coach Jörg Roßkopf a 1-0 lead on Saturday when he defeated South Korea's top player Jang Woojin in 3:1 sets.
When the score was 2-2, he also beat 22-year-old An Jaehyun for the first time in his career.
»We always catch each other up«
After the five-set defeat of 19-year-old World Cup debutant Kay Stumper (Borussia Düsseldorf) against Cho Seungmin, the German team was initially 2-1 behind.
But single European champion Dang Qiu (Borussia Düsseldorf), who had lost his first game against An Jaehyun 1:3, won the duel between the two leading players with Jang Woojin (3:1) under great pressure and thus forced the decisive fifth game.
"The special thing about this tournament is that if Bene loses or Dang loses or I lose, there is always someone else who performs particularly well," said Stumper, "we always catch each other up."
But it will be particularly difficult in the final.
The Germans lost 0: 3 against the favored Chinese in the two previous major finals (Olympics 2021 and World Cup 2018).
And while the title-decorated Timo Boll and Dimitrij Ovtcharov (both training deficits) and Patrick Franziska, who has just become a father, are not present at European Champion Germany, the World Cup host and defending champion still has the top line-up at the table: World Champion Fan Zhendong , Olympic champion Ma Long and mixed world champion Wang Chuqin.
The third in the world rankings, Liang Jingkun, has so far only been a substitute in this team.
In the 3-2 semi-final win over Japan, however, the Chinese had a harder time than expected as Japan's one-time prodigy Tomokazu Harimoto beat Wang Chuqin and Fan Zhendong.
Nevertheless, Duda says: "Of course it will be the hardest game of all.
But we will give everything again and hope for a sensation.«
ngo/dpa/sid