Recently, the national table tennis is preparing for the Macau World Cup, and this competition has been reheld after three years and has attracted much attention. Therefore, the national table tennis also attaches great importance to it, and this time sent 12 players to compete for rich bonuses and points, hoping to win glory for the country.
At the same time as the countdown to this competition began, just recently from the news released by the People's Daily, the competition of the Macau World Cup has been restructured. This change in the format is very unfriendly to some players in the Chinese team, especially Liang Jingkun, Ma Long and Chen Meng are likely to suffer big losses in the process of competing for the championship.
Just recently, the People's Daily published a report titled "The ITTF World Cup will be held in Macau, and the new format will add more highlights". In this article, the People's Daily highlighted that a lot of changes have taken place in the return of the Macau World Cup. First of all, the number of participants will be increased from 16 to 48, which means that the competition will be more fierce and more brutal. In addition, in order to select more outstanding players from the 48 players to compete for the championship, the Macau World Cup has also reformed the rules of the game, which is divided into two stages.
First of all, the first stage is the group stage, and the second stage is the knockout stage. In the group stage, all players are divided into 16 groups, and each group has three players to play a round-robin match, and whichever player can finish first in the group will advance to the knockout stage to compete for huge points and prize money. It is worth mentioning that the format of this group stage is highly controversial, and each game requires four rounds to be played, which is a big change from the regular number of rounds in the past. In this regard, many fans feel that Da Fat is likely to suffer a big loss.
Because everyone knows very well that Liang Jingkun himself is a very slow player. In the past, the Incheon Championship was able to win the championship thanks to the best-of-9 format. If you only play four games like now, Da Fat is likely to fall behind at the beginning and eventually be eliminated by the opponent, and there is no chance of turning the tables at all. Therefore, the longer the format of the game drags on, the more beneficial it will be for Big Fat. Considering that this season is very bad for him, I hope he will quickly get rid of the problem of slow heating, otherwise this World Cup will suffer very much.
Once in the knockout rounds, the tournament will revert to the regular best-of-seven format, with the final winner on the top podium. However, considering that the format has become so complicated this time, it will undoubtedly be a very severe test for the two veterans, Ma Long and Chen Meng. Because everyone knows very well that before, these ace players did not need to participate in the group stage at all, and they could directly participate in the knockout round. Now that there is a group stage, it means that Chen Meng and Ma Long have to play a few more games, which will put a great test of the physical strength of these veterans.
The reason why Ma Long lost to Da Fat in the semifinals was because of his physical strength. In this way, this format is really unfriendly for the three players, and I hope they must be careful.