Blame the competition and the teams structure, China definitely fielded him in every match.
The gap has always been bigger in women's, while the recent Busan performance was interesting, doubles as a component of Teams and its forcing the best singles players to play each other has favored China even more than 5 singles matches or the old flexible doubles as third match format.
Cinderella stories of Paris Olympics TT:
Miwa's easily the weakest on team Japan but I don't have hope that Hayata and Hirano will do better. Based on matches in recent months leading up to the Olympics it feels like China has decoded all of them already.
I disagree that Miwa is easily the weakest. Matchups always matter and she is a pretty smart player, but her problem is lack of experience to place struggles in context. Given how seemingly useless the coach for Japan is, they should probably have made her father the women's team coach so that she could have coaching that maximized her performance.
their best bet is playing Hirano in singles, Harimoto is quite good at doubles as well, but even then there's little to no chance
As it was written, so it shall be done lol.
I think she's weakest in the Olympic context. Her technical skills may have surpassed Hirano but based on her post match interview where she said she felt 'nothing but relief' it seems that she still can't handle the pressure. My feeling is that Hirano and Hayata would have at least found a way to make that match against Kaufmann competitive.
I wonder how she handled her brother wanting to die after his bitter loss against Sweden.
Seeing Miwa, she looks more like the stable one while her brother is an emotional wreck.
You mean the other countries when you speak of competition...
I get the feeling. But I keep reminding people that Lily, Batra and Akula are not chopped liver either, we have seen Lily play top players and they don't beat her as badly as Kaufmann did, same with Akula and Batra. We don't have a good sample size on Kaufmann but when I watched all her matches, the combination of quality, ball placement and leftie deception was extremely potent. If Germany gets ABC and Kaufmann retains her vein of form and beats Lee, then it will be easier to see what it would look like against Hirano after seeing Kauffmann vs Shin.
