The All Time Greatest

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Ah, my apologies, I didn't realise the competition was so strong in Sweden! Its common only to hear of Waldner and Persson on a regular basis which is why I wrongly assumed the depth wasn't there.

My bad.

Could you still argue that the CNT of today has more depth than the Swedish team of that era? Or is that incorrect?

Wait, did you really just say this??????!!!!!

The Swedish team beat China and won the 2000 World Team Table Tennis Championships. They beat a team with Kong Linghui, Liu Gouliang, Ma Lin and Wang Liqin all at their height. How could they have possibly done that without a complete team?


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Wait, did you really just say this??????!!!!!

The Swedish team beat China and won the 2000 World Team Table Tennis Championships. They beat a team with Kong Linghui, Liu Gouliang, Ma Lin and Wang Liqin all at their height. How could they have possibly done that without a complete team?


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Please note that I was 4 years old in 2000, and so my knowledge of that time is very limited :)

I was referring to the overall strength of the nations, not just their top teams. Perhaps I wasn't clear.

I.e, China have a ridiculous amount of depth now, how does this compare to the Swedish depth of players in 2000?

I never said their team wasn't complete, the key word was "depth"

:)

Obviously Sweden had a stronger and complete first team, they won after all...
 
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Agreed! Maybe we should focus on 2005 upwards haha :)

Sorry about this is, one thing I'm confused about is, why call it best player of all times and then say, "from 2005-2016." That is best player of the past 11 years. And the interesting thing is, if you do that, you have to ask:

Wang Liqin
Ma Lin
Wang Hao
Werner Schlager
Ryu Seung Min
Joo Se Hyuk
Zhang Jike
Ma Long

Does one of them REALLY stand head and shoulders above the rest?

Some people would like the names Timo Bill or Vladimir Samsonov to be added. I say, why not add them. Maybe there is more. It is nice to know how much great talent there really has been in table tennis over the last 11 years. I would rather look at things that way than trying to diminish the achievements of certain players to prop up the achievements of others.


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Please note that I was 4 years old in 2000, and so my knowledge of that time is very limited :)

I was referring to the overall strength of the nations, not just their top teams. Perhaps I wasn't clear.

I.e, China have a ridiculous amount of depth now, how does this compare to the Swedish depth of players in 2000?

I never said their team wasn't complete, the key word was "depth"

:)

Obviously Sweden had a stronger and complete first team, they won after all...

Wait, again, are you really saying this?

Total population of China in 2013: 1.4 Billion.

Total population of Sweden in 2013: 9.6 Million.

Are you really serious? I think those numbers mean that China has 145 times higher total population than Sweden.

And if you look at the performance of guys outside of the top 4 in China in international play, there is really a HUGE drop-off in performance. So, from my perspective in spite of how many players China has that are quite good players, there is a reason the top 4 are who they are and guys like Yan An and Fang Bo only had limited success when given the opportunity to step up to the international playing field.

So, for a country 145 times smaller, who didn't scout children from the age of 4 and start them in full 6 hour a day, 6 day a week training by the age of 6, I think Sweden may have had more depth than China.

And again, they won the World Team Table Tennis Championship title against a Chinese team that had 4 guys who could be in the mix for best player of their era:

Ma Lin
Wang Liqin
Liu Gouliang
Kong Linghui

You can't beat that team without real, actual depth. Not just the team but the coaches and the players that pushed them on their way up, in training and in competition when they were coming up.

And again, Waldner beat everyone on that list and the preceding generation of Chinese team players too.

BYW: if you were 4 in 2000 and you want a discussion about the best player in history, I suggest you may as well do your homework.

And I suggest you research Victor Barna. 22 World titles including 5 consecutive WTTC singles titles. That is a decade of total domination. Can you really say that ZJK deserves more recognition when his period of greatness was hot and cold over a period that lasted 2 (that is TWO) whole years?

Would you blame Victor Barna for standing head and shoulders above the rest in an era before people actually knew how to play.

I guess Babe Ruth wasn't as good as Barry Bonds because nobody knew what anabolic steroids were in the 1920s. Let's just forget that he practically invented the home run.

If you look at baseball history, before "The Babe" the standard hitting technique was to chop down at the ball to try and make an awkward bounce that made the ball harder to field. The standard swing in baseball was an outgrowth of Ruth trying to hit the ball over the fence and out of the park. Today's players could not be who they are without the guys like Ruth who came before them.

Barna and Reisman paved the way for Bengsten, and others who paved the way for Persson and Waldner and without them there never would have been a Kong and without Kong there would not have been a Liqin and without Liqin there would not have been a Ma Long. Zhang Jike, I don't know about. He took a technique that most coaches said never to do and showed how he could dominate the game with an over the table BH from the FH side. So he turned some things UpSideDown. (Ha, I like that idea). But FZD may end up making a more lasting impression on the sport than him anyway. Even though he innovated FZD's style.

Anyway, the present rests on the foundations of the past. Let's just appreciate how many great players there have been.

Guys like Primorac, Gatien and Saive also deserve honorable mention for there great play in spite of not having won as many big titles as they could have.


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Hard to answer honestly. What era are we talking? The game has changed too much IMO.

38mm era?
40mm celluloid era?
40+ plastic era?

You might now think there's not a huge difference but I'll contend going from the slightly faster & more spiny celluloid era to slower 40+ plastic era certainly helped Ma Long (a forehand dominate player) and hurt ZJK (a backhand dominate player).

Give me the 38mm era and I think Liu Guoliang in his prime could beat just about anybody. He certainly has the titles to back that claim up.

But could he in his prime playing his style in the plastic era beat say FZD? I don't know. It'd be hard.

Furthermore, how good would Ma Long or FDZ be in the 38mm era? Probably really really good but how good? We'll never know.

While I'm not sure what the answer is here, and I think FZD could eventually snag this title, I do have to mention that it sure looks like Walder could play in every era and be very very strong.
 
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I have a soft spot for Guo Yuehua, but that's cos he was world champ when i started to play seriously. Also, a totally different era of 21/5 ... iirc, LGL and Ma Lin were borderline 21/5 to 11/2 era? Need to google on when that changed. Sometime after i 'retired' from TT.

* runs and hides in the daily chit chat thread from the wraths of everyone on this thread :) *
 
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Well Carl, to be honest I was just creating this to get people's opinions so you can go ahead and name every player In history if you want... I don't appreciate the super long rants telling me to do my homework, I know there have been hundreds of great players who deserve lots of recognition, I'm not stupid. I watch a lot of ping pong.Im also not saying one player deserves more recognition than the other as that's ridiculous, everyone has their own opinion :) I thought it would be nice to open a thread about who people thought was their greatest player, which also gives people the chance to talk about players who they think might deserve a bit more recognition. I appreciate your input but I'm not a fan of being told "are you really asking this?" when I thought the question was fairly reasonable given I have limited knowledge of anything prior to 2005. I guess next time I'll just google it instead of asking for some helpful advice on here. If you think a question is stupid just don't answer it and let someone else :)
 
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I think the main issue arises from how largely table tennis has changed in recent times compared with other sports - in tennis, despite the advancements and changes in style over the last few decades, you can pretty much out and out say that Roger Federer is the greatest player of all time because ultimately whilst there have been some changes, it has been quite gradual for tennis and over a very long period of time, so RF and his success can be compared to older Open Era players with a fair amount of ease.

Conversely with table tennis the game is totally different to how it was even 16 years ago. In the 2000 Olympics you were allowed to speed glue, matches were played to 21, you could hide your serves, frictionless long pimples were allowed and the ball was 38mm and made of celluloid.

Fast forward 16 years and the sport is completely different due to countless changes made for better or worse, which makes it incredibly hard to compare different generations of players.

I think if you were asking for the greatest of all time, I personally would say Waldner because he found large amounts of success & demonstrated incredible longevity throughout his career and through all these changes, and was able to develop a style and adapt it to fit the rapidly changing sport.

I would say watching Ma Long and Zhang Jike at their best is downright impressive but for the above reasons if I had to choose I'd give it to Waldner.

Having said that due to the difficulty of coming up with a definitive answer its a very open ended discussion.

Very interesting though!
 
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Easy guys, i think Carl's posts could be intended differently to how they might have come across.

I think having witnessed the Waldner era in real Life it's probably unquestionable who is the G.O.A.T. (sort of like Ridderz' post)
But not having witnessed that time personally might make things appear a little differently, as i wrote in my first post.

Whereas people that have witnessed Victor Barna's era might even laugh at Waldner....
[Emoji6]

Maybe changing this to which player left the deepest Impact would be a bit more fair, 'cause there have been so many amazing players throughout the history of TT.

As OSPH brought up Guo Yuehua, there are so many more who left their footprints.

For instance one name which most forum members haven't heard of yet is Erich Arndt.
He's said to have brought the topspin technique to germany back in the last century's fifties.

I once had the chance to speak to Eberhard Schöler, and after a while he asked me where i was playing at, and he said directly: Oh, isn't that we're Erich Arndt's coming from?
;)
Those two had some serious battles in the fifties and sixties.

But then again, I'm not sure if that would realistically be considered as G.O.A.T.
[Emoji2]
Generally i think today's game is way more taxing for the body than fifteen years ago or even further back, so it's gonna be real hard to stay in the game as long as Victor Barna, J.O. Waldner, Vladi or a few others did/do....
 
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Look, the intention of the thread is fine. The idea of best era by era would be fine. Whose your favorite player would be fine. Who do you think has been best since 2005 would be fine. But none of these are the title of the thread: "The All Time Greatest".

And responding to the information that Sweden won the 2000 WTTTC title against one of the best CNT teams ever with this:

"I.e, China have a ridiculous amount of depth now, how does this compare to the Swedish depth of players in 2000?"

Seems to be unfair. Did China have the amount of not quite top level depth they have now in 2000? Or was this a result of having had a small country like Sweden with 1/145th the Human Resources of China beat the CNT in 2000?

Was there really a need to question if Sweden's achievement was as impressive as it was simply because of how much larger the Chinese talent pool has always been than any other single country?

Again, China is amazing. They maximize the talent potential with the best resources, best coaching and most systematic approach to developing players from an early age.

Why would you question Sweden's depth after finding out that they had enough depth to beat a team which, on paper looks pretty close to unbeatable?

Was there an actual purpose? Did I misunderstand you and just assume you were questioning how deep they were when you were really asking for information?

To me, I guess it sounded like you had laid out an impossible task. In spite of winning in 2000, did Sweden have as many players who could have been in the top 100 as China seems to have in the Chinese Super League?

Does anyone remember if the Chinese provinces had as many almost top 100 players back in 2000 as they do today?

Is that the proper way to judge the depth of a country that has about the same total population as NYC in comparison to the most populous country in the world?


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Ah, my apologies, I didn't realise the competition was so strong in Sweden! Its common only to hear of Waldner and Persson on a regular basis which is why I wrongly assumed the depth wasn't there.

My bad.

Could you still argue that the CNT of today has more depth than the Swedish team of that era? Or is that incorrect?
Erik Lindh was ranked 5th in the world 89, if I remember correctly, and he didn't get to play in the final. That says something about the level of competition...

China had, and probably always will have, more depth than any other country, but that is what made their achievement so great.
 
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Okay , let me try another tac ... no international sport deserves a discussion on "GOAT" , agreed time and again journalists throw it out there just to create some rumble but its not really fair , to either the icons or the games or its avid follower ...

the reason is very simple , every popular sport is an evolution on the last generation , so of course Ma Long might beat Marty Reismann with his left hand but does it take away Marty's claim to being one of the greatest of all time, the answer is a resounding "No" ....

to understand the superficial incongruity of this you have to appreciate the resources that is being put by atheletes , sponsors and countries into play to refine the game from the last generation , so unless we are talking about a sport where the rules have stayed intact , and its played by a limited number of players there is no way you can define the greatest of all time , all you can do is list down the greatest players the sport has had , and thats why even in sports with such strong players like Pele in Soccer, Federer in Tennis or Gary Sobers in Cricket you cannot say they are they greatest , they are all "arguably" the greatest ... and so it is in table tennis ... you could ask .. who do you idolize , who do you get inspired by etc. etc. ... and they will always have a definite answer without controversy ...
 
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This is probably national pride talking, but if you took a 6 year old Waldner through time and put him in any era and let him start his table tennis career then I think he'd still do very well.

People see the Waldner that played in 2004 and think "He'd never be strong, explosive and fit enough to keep up with the players of today". The truth is that the Waldner that won in 89 was _really_ fit.

I'm not so sure that he would enjoy playing in this era though...
 
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This is probably national pride talking, but if you took a 6 year old Waldner through time and put him in any era and let him start his table tennis career then I think he'd still do very well.

People see the Waldner that played in 2004 and think "He'd never be strong, explosive and fit enough to keep up with the players of today". The truth is that the Waldner that won in 89 was _really_ fit.

I'm not so sure that he would enjoy playing in this era though...

As I said previously, what makes Waldner stand out for me is his longevity throughout all the large amounts of change the sport went through. It is incredibly impressive.

I agree with your sentiment that he would probably still do very well. I actually think he has a style that favours him against an opponent such as Ma Long, but obviously it's impossible to compare them at their peaks and say who would win.

He has come out and said that he thinks the plastic ball was not a good change, so you might be right about him enjoying it a little less these days!
 
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I understand both of you. Having seen Waldner playing from an early age on i can understand your point, but to someone younger it's a total different story.
Waldner's game doesn't or rather didn't Look as spectacular and athletic as Xu Xin's game for instance.
And i believe he could be having quite a hard time with the modern game. I'm not saying he wouldn't be able to adapt, but it's actually impossible to compare, 'cause the game has changed so much...
I think it will be easier finding the best player of an era instead of finding an all time greatest. This will be nearly an impossible task IMHO. The game has just become too different.

I sort of agree with you, and I personally think that Ma Long is the greatest player of all time. I say that, even though I first learned to play in Sweden, a really long time ago, so am a big fan of all Swedish table tennis (my heroes growing up were Bengtsson, Johansson and Surbek).

Still, I have to say that I think Waldner at his best would find Xu Xin to be a pretty easy nut to crack. Xu Xin is not Ma Long. Waldner would not have let him do what he does. Even in his own day, Waldner was a bit anomalous. Not much power on his BH, for example. But so deceptive on everything, so creative, and filthy serves, really good serve returns, ridiculous anticipation. People didn't overwhelm Waldner with power, not even guys like Gatien in the 38 mm era, who had every bit as much power as guys now do. Waldner is way up towards the top of the lost of all players ever.

But Ma Long at his best has no weakness whatsoever. Almost every one of his shots is among the handful of best players in the world for that shot. It took him awhile to get there, he kind of had to learn to win big ones. But there he is. And until someone in a really major event beats him a couple of times, there he will stay in my book.

It is hard to compare across eras, but if I limit my consideration of last 25 years, then Waldner was pretty unique. And he was really good for a really long time. Somebody else mentioned that. He really covered multiple eras. I have a few other guys I would put in that really rarefied layer of ridiculously great all-time players. WLQ*, ZJK, and KLH for sure, LGL also, along with Waldner. After that there is a gap and then a bunch of other great players. Persson. Wang Hao. Ma Lin.

* 48 straight months ranked number 1 in the world, which is very unfortunate for Ma Lin.
 
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In China , the only European who they love and respect and hate at the same time lolz Waldner =made postal stamps out of the respect :) that's pretty much sum is up how much they have respect for him :) with out those legends came before the current legends there are not much to talk about. Every sports has it :)
 
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In the actual tennis it is the same, eras, we can't call someone as the greatest until so many years and decades or even centuries are passing, i was born in 1980, i was watching tennis in end of 80's and nearly most of 90's and not much of 2000s and onwards, and at that times i was watching Pete Sampras the most, and he became a legend because he was the most winning the grand slam titles [14], but then RF came to take the throne from him, and Rod Laver was the greatest before because he won the grand slam in one complete year, and then R.Nadal came to won as much as Sampras did but RF remeain the king, who knows after 10 more years if Novak D. can win even more titles of grand slam, Sampras never won the French open, Novak never won the gold in Olympics, and i think even RF the Maestro didn't win the gold in olympics while Andy Murray won it twice.

I think the next generations should ask who is the greatest of all time, maybe in the future someone will win the grand slam in TT twice or 3 times.

And No, i am not the greatest, sure not one of members here too ;) :cool: :p
 
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