Qualification Stage Completed! The WTTC Main Draw Has Commenced!

Qualification stage completed! The main draw starts tomorrow!

Over the last 2 days the 2017 World Championships has seen some intense matches in the qualification stages in the men’s and women’s singles. Meanwhile the doubles categories have progressed further and have started the main draws already! The fans are increasing daily and you can feel the atmosphere beginning to build for the big matches to come…

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Fang Bo and Petrissa Solja progress into the next stage!

Written by Tom Lewis

Singles

Today saw the men’s singles qualification groups completed. 64 players then had to be cut in half to progress to the main draw. A preliminary round was played to give the magic 128 players to complete the draw. The round of 128 will start at 2pm (Local Time) for the men’s singles event on the 31st May! Local favourite Timo Boll will be the first match on table 1 against the lively Scottish player Gavin Rumgay. Gavin managed to secure a place in the main draw today.

Top seed Ma Long will take on the Italian player Mihai Bobocica on table 2, a seemingly easy warm up match for the Olympic Champion and world number 1. The other Chinese players seem to have relatively easy first matches. Fan Zhendong has the toughest match for a Chinese player with Frenchman Quentin Robinot. The main draw matches are going to exciting, this is the stage where the lower ranked players could take out a seed! Anything can happen.

The women’s singles matches tomorrow in the main draw round of 128 include top seed Ding Ning vs Daria Trigolos from Belarus. German favourite Petrissa Solja takes on USA player Yue Wu. Solja had a good day today in the mixed doubles event alongside her Chinese partner Fang Bo, she will be looking to perform tomorrow in the singles.

Mixed Doubles

The mixed doubles event advanced furthest today. The top seed for the tournament is the Korean pair Lee Sangsu and Yang Haeun, they won both of their matches today and are into the last 16 of the draw. Meanwhile Fang Bo and Petrissa Solja won 2 great matches today and will play Chuang Chih Yuan and Chen Szu- Ya from Chinese Taipei in the next round. The mixed doubles event is very well contested this year and anyone could take it. The Japanese pair of Kasumi Ishikawa and Maharu Yoshimura are looking confident. Also, the Swedish pair of Mattias Karlsson and Matida Ekholm are also dangerous. Another Chinese-euro pair is Jonathan Groth from Denmark and Yalan Feng, they could also be an outsider in this category.

Doubles

The men’s doubles main draw kicked off today with players playing an initial round of 64 match. The top seeds Morizono and Oshima from Japan overcame Freitas and Gacina 4-0 in an intense first match. They look to continue their good form in their match tomorrow against the experienced Karakasevic and Wang Zengyi. Fan Zhendong and Xu Xin won their match today comfortably 4-0. They face the talented French players Tristan Flore and Emmanuel Lebesson tomorrow evening. The match of the day was definitely between Romanian players Adrian Crisan and Ovidiu Ionescu against Patrick Franziska and Jonathan Groth. The latter won it 4-3 after the Romanians showed great sportsmanship allowing a fault serve against them and then lost after Franziska hit the net! Big names in the hall Timo Boll and Ma Long repeat their partnership this year and look to do even better. They won their first match 4-0 against an aggressive Hungarian partnership. The big guns will take on Achanta and Gnanasekaran from India tomorrow in the last 32.

We hope that you are as excited as we are for the singles main draw to commence tomorrow, as well as the other events which are really heating up!

We are really excited to be covering the World Championships on TTD and look forward to the big matches ahead! Stay tuned for updates, training hall footage, interviews, articles and much more… Catch up with all the latest highlighted matches in the TTD Video Library and watch all the very latest training hall videos here.

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Photos by: ITTF Flickr
Written by: Tom Lewis
TableTennisDaily
 
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