The Su Cup final will be played tonight, the winner and runner-up teams have not yet been produced, but two teams that have won the third place tie and joined hands on the podium have been created, they are South Korea and Malaysia. For the veteran South Korean team, this is a reasonable result, but for the Malaysian team, which is all young, the bronze medal is both a record best result and a breakthrough for young people.
If it had been five years ago, Malaysia, with three Silver Medals at the Rio Olympics, would have been able to achieve a good result. But with Li Zongwei announcing his retirement in 2019, Wu Weisheng / Chen Weiqiang announced that they would break up after the Tokyo Olympics, Chen Bingqiao / Wu Liuying chose to rest at the Tokyo Olympics, and the Malaysian team that came to Vantaa in Finland to participate in the Su Cup was almost a young face, the average age of the eight members of the main lineup was only 23.1 years old, and the oldest was Xie Yiqian, a mixed doubles actress who was not yet 26 years old.
The most well-known of the Malaysian squad are also this year's All England Men's Singles Champion Li Zijia and Tokyo Olympic Men's Doubles Bronze Medalist Xie Dingfeng/Su Weiyi, but in fact, on the way to the podium, it is not only the men's singles and men's doubles that shine, but their other three individual events have played the impact of young people.
The group stage against England was a battle for qualifying, and on the basis of the men's singles and men's doubles scores, mixed doubles Xu Bangrong/Xie Yiqian defeated England's strongers and Won the first group in the Olympic Games, Marcus/Smith, the first european mixed doubles team to qualify for the team. Later, in the quarter-final with Indonesia, the mixed doubles pair fought Jordan/Meratti in the fifth mixed doubles match of the tiebreaker to reach the decider, and finally locked in the victory 21-16, finishing the final kick for Malaysia on the podium.
If the young Li Zijia and Su Weiyi/Xie Dingfeng have become the key and hope for them to win points, then this mixed doubles combination is the biggest gain of the Malaysian team in this Su Cup.
In addition, the women's doubles chen kangle / Tina and Olympic champion Polly / Rahayu after 91 minutes of fierce battle before losing, and twice against Japan's Nao Matsuyama / Chiyo Shida and Matsutomo Misaki / Matsumoto Mayu fiercely, also showed the growth of the Swiss Open women's doubles champion. Although he missed the Tokyo Olympics, as the only "post-00s" in Malaysia, Chen Kangle seems to be the core figure of women's doubles.
At the 2009 Sudirman Cup in Guangzhou, Li Zongwei, Huang Miaozhu, Chen Wenhong, Gu Jianjie, Huang Petty and other famous players of the previous generation led the Malaysian team to a historic third place in the Sudirman Cup; 12 years later, a new generation of young people took over the banner under the pressure of public opinion and once again reached the podium with the achievement of defeating the powerful Indonesian team.
In yesterday's semi-finals, Li Zijia defeated Kento Momota 2-0 to avenge the loss of the group stage, and also completed the second defeat of the opponent this year, scoring the only point of malaysia. The sentence he said after the game, "I am not Li Zongwei, I am just me, I am Li Zijia" may be the voice of the Malaysian team members who are taking the lead. They have no intention of comparing themselves to their predecessors, and they want to go their own way.