Friends who pay attention to national table tennis know that the countries with a relatively high level of table tennis are basically in Asia and Europe. In history, only the U.S. table tennis team has been a non-Asian and European country that has won the world championship (ten times the championship has also been wide), but that was more than half a century ago.
Even so, north and south America have also had Chinese Canadian Player Huang Wenguan, Japanese-Brazilian Player Oyama Hugo and other athletes who can compete with the world championship, and this year there is a Brazilian youngster named Hugo Calderano who has suddenly risen and has now advanced to the top ten positions in the world rankings, which is generally good.
Compared with the Americas, the level of table tennis in Africa is still relatively poor. The people there are good at many sports, but table tennis is not one of them. However, Africa has a large population base, so from time to time it can produce some table tennis players who are still at a good level, which is better than Oceania and Antarctica (Penguin: Bullshit).
In the current table tennis world, there are two African table tennis players with strong skills, the first is an Egyptian player, called ASSAR Omar; the other is believed that many fans are already familiar with it, that is, the Nigerian player, aruna Quadri, who has the title of "lion" in African table tennis.
Born in 1991, Omar is roughly a generation of players with Fang Bo, Zhou Yu, Yan An and others in the national table tennis. This big brother is 1.94 meters tall, which is extremely rare in the whole table tennis world. Table tennis has relatively flexible height requirements, like Japan's Ito Mimachi is only 1 meter 50, still able to win the world championship of national table tennis, while Belarus's Samsonov is 1 meter 90 tall and has won the men's singles championship of three World Cups.
However, in general, being higher than 1 meter 90 or shorter than 1 meter 50 still has a certain impact on the play. Too short a guard area is small, too high movements may not be flexible. Not many table tennis players taller than Samsonov have played well in history, and the former Yugoslav calinitz (who is still a straight board player) has won the world championship doubles title, and others have achieved more average achievements (but there are not many people who play table tennis so high).
Because of his tall stature, Omar's technical style is very similar to that of Europeans, mainly winning with two-sided arc balls. What is valuable is that although he is not afraid to retire from the stage, he can stand on the near platform and be more active in the start, rather than many Europeans who are keen on the defense of the far-flung platform, so his ball aggression is relatively stronger, and it is not too passive to play.
But Omar's ball still has many common problems of European big athletes, that is, the arc ball is too positive, decent, can not rush, the emphasis is on continuous attack rather than quick victory, which also gives the opponent a lot of opportunities to counterattack.
In the 2015 Table Tennis World Cup, Omar and Malone played a ball and performed ok and won the first set; last year's Austrian Open, he won against Hong Kong's Huang Zhenting; this year's World Table Tennis Championships group stage, he beat Germany's World Cup singles champion Pol. At present, Omar is ranked 21 in the world, and the best ranking in history is 16, which is also very good in the world.
After Omar, let's talk about Aruna.
Aruna was born in 1988, and Ma Long, Zhang Jike is a generation, 1 meter 77 tall, much shorter than Omar, but his ball is far more violent than Omar - observe Aruna's technical movements, quite simple, the backhand is basically pasted, not advanced at all, but the forehand is extremely lethal, because his explosive power is very large, so the ball is always more powerful and rotating than imagined.
In the 2014 World Cup, Aruna played very well against Grand Slam player Zhang Jike (also the men's singles champion of the later World Cup), and lost 2-4. Zhang Jike's ball was already known for its explosive power, and as a result, it was obviously crushed in front of Aruna, which showed how powerful Aruna's muscles were.
At the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, Aruna exploded, with Two World Champions Zhuang Zhiyuan and Ball entering the top eight of the men's singles. However, he was unlucky, the last Time the World Cup touched Zhang Jike, this Olympic Games touched Malone again, the result was 0-4 disarmed, the loss was a bit awkward - Aruna is characterized by not afraid of stalemate and positional warfare, because he has good physical strength and strength. But if you encounter an athlete with a high level of tactics such as Ma Long, it is difficult to play, so there is a situation where the Olympic Games are defeated by the Dragons by four or two strokes.
After the ITTF changed the new plastic ball, Aruna's state dropped a lot, because the new ball weakened the quality of the forehand arc ball, so that the importance of techniques such as backhand twisting was relatively increased, which was obviously very unfavorable for players like Aruna who played the world with forehand.
Aruna is currently ranked 20th in the world, close to Omar. Although not world-class, they have all beaten the world champions (Bohr: this... ), the strength is still there. However, the table tennis foundation in Africa is indeed weak, the conditions are not very good, and it is not easy to play in the position, so they are also table tennis players who deserve our respect.
Or that sentence: a single branch is not spring, thousands of purples and thousands of reds are full of spring. For table tennis to really develop, it needs the rise of more athletes like Omar, Aruna, Calderano, so that it can be regarded as a real world. I hope that athletes from other continents will continue to work hard to create better results, and the national table tennis also welcomes everyone to challenge, and the battle against the masters is more memorable!