Poker in German

Timo Boll wins fourth European trophy of the season

The victory of the German Timo Boll ended the first ever European Super Cup, played over two days in Kazan by eight of the strongest small racket masters of the Old World. In the decisive match, Ball prevailed over Belarusian Vladimir Samsonov - 4:0 (11:9, 11:4, 11:9, 16:14). For the German, the 2007 season was the most successful in his career. This year he won three golds at the European Championships (in singles, doubles and team tournaments) and now he has won a fundamentally new trophy. In the fight for third place, our Alexey Smirnov lost to the Dane Michael Maze - 2:4 (11:1, 6:11, 11:5, 7:11, 4:11, 5:11).

“I haven’t been able to play consistently throughout the entire match,” Smirnov complained after his defeat in the bronze medal match. - Now this is my main problem. What makes Timo Boll so strong is that he maintains concentration from the first play to the last. Therefore, his victory in the tournament is well deserved.”

The closing ceremony of the competition turned into a very colorful show, with laser and pyrotechnic effects. Compared to what ping pong fans and participants could observe at the finish of the Old World Championship in Belgrade (Serbia) and the World Championship in Zagreb (Croatia), the organizers of the tournament in Kazan exceeded all expectations and pleasantly surprised the leaders of the European Table Tennis Union and the athletes and their coaches.

“A year ago, holding the European Super Cup was just a dream,” said Italian ETTU President Stefano Bosi. -- Three months later it became a more realistic project. And in March we signed an agreement with the Russian Table Tennis Federation, and the tournament became a reality. FNTR offered us the capital of Kazan as the host of the competition, and we agreed with this opinion. This is a city with good infrastructure, history, and besides, Kazan needs to prepare to host the 2013 Universiade. As a result, we were very pleased with the level of organization of the Super Cup and once again came to the conclusion that ETTU made an absolutely correct decision a year ago, granting Russia the right to host the 2008 European Championship.”

The Super Cup was replete with spectacular, intense and uncompromising fights, among which the two semi-final matches, which ended in seven games, plus the victories of Samsonov and Smirnov over Chen Weixin, competing under the Austrian flag, won in the preliminary stage, are especially worth highlighting. The naturalized Chinese can perhaps be called the main loser of the Super Cup, because he lost both key meetings in the group with a score of 3:4.

As for the semi-final stage, the match between Smirnov and Ball became a clear illustration of certain problems with the Russian’s psychological attitude and ability to play a match at the same level. Alexey won the first two games, then led 3:1, but then lost three sets in a row - 3:4 (11:9, 11:8, 9:11, 12:10, 8:11, 6:11 , 5:11). The meeting between Samsonov and Maze, who played in a pronounced defensive manner, turned out to be just as long - 4:3 (10:12, 11:8, 11:4, 11:4, 9:11, 9:11, 11:8) .

At the group stage, Samsonov and Maze had different workloads. If the Dane played all three matches scheduled for the first day of the tournament, then the Belarusian was credited with a victory over the Greek Kalinikos Kreanga without a fight. The unpleasant incident with the Hellene’s injury, received already in the opening match against Smirnov with the score 2:2 in games, will certainly make the organizers and management of ETTU think about more official substitutes in the future.

The “hot reserve” in the person of Igor Rubtsov was exhausted immediately when it became known that the Czech Petr Korbel was not coming. The Russian champion found himself in Group A along with Ball, Maze and Austrian Werner Schlager. The most that Igor managed was to take a game each from Ball and the 2003 world champion Schlager, and he lost to the Dane dry. And in the four “B”, Kreanga’s injury did not allow him to compete with Samsonov and Chen Weixin. In tennis, for example, in this situation, the second substitute would play for the Greek and could count on part of the prize fund.

The Super Cup participants have already flown from Kazan to St. Petersburg, where yesterday the next stage of the Pro Tour world series began with qualifying matches. Ball was seeded number one, Samsonov was seeded number two, and our Smirnov and Fedor Kuzmin entered the main draw directly. Our veterans Dmitry Mazunov, Maxim Shmyrev, European youth champion Mikhail Paykov, Rubtsov and a number of other Russians had to start the St. Petersburg Open Championship with qualifications.

Ilya TRISVIATSKY, Kazan-Moscow