Event information
The best players of the World soon in Liège
It’s a rare show, an exceptional and unique moment for table tennis lovers : thanks to Philippe Saive and his strong and proven ability to organize such events, the ITTF World Cup comes back to Liège on 20-22 October 2017. This means a fantastic opportunity to admire the best players of the World in another way than television or computer screen.
Among the 20 players, the recent World Champion Ma Long, undisputed leader of the table tennis planet, with his outstanding list of titles, including the gold medal in the Olympic Games of Rio 2016. Next to him, the ITTF World Cup gathers all the Continental champions. We already know the name of one of them: Dimitrij Ovtcharov, winner of the last European Top 16 in Antibes (France) last February. For the other champions, patience is needed as Asian and African Cup will take place in the next weeks. There is one thing for certain: only the best can shine on such continental competitions and be one the the 20 players to qualify for the World Cup. To get an idea of the level of play, a glance on the previous winners is very instructive: you will find all the great Chinese players among which the young prodigy Fan Zhendong, winner of the 2016 edition in Saarbrucken, but also Olympic champions Ma Long and Zhang Jike or Ma Lin and Wang Hao. The last European players to win this competition are Timo Boll and Vladimir Samsonov as unforgettable Swede champions Mikael Appelgren, Jorgen Persson and of course Jan-Ove Waldner. In conclusion, only the best players of the world can win this particular competition as Belgian public has got the chance to see it for three times in 2005 (Liège), 2008 (Liège) and 2013 (Verviers).
28 matches (best of 7 games) will be played with a preliminary stage involving 12 players divided in 4 equal groups of 3 players with all the members of a group playing each other. The top 2 finishers of each preliminary group then join the top 8 players in the second stage of competition which consists of a knockout draw: a total performance during 3 days of high level table tennis.
The Men’s Singles final between Olympic and World Champion, Ma Long and World no.2 Fan Zhendong was aired live from 20:31 – 22:00 China Central Time, and was watched by close to 20 million people every minute on average on CCTV-5!
It makes the match the third most watched sports programme in 2017 so far; the two games of the Chinese Football team versus Korea and Iran received higher viewership, 30 million and 24 million respectively.
Additionally, one in 19 of the 356 million Chinese watching TV at that time watched the Men’s Singles final on CCTV-5. In total, over 50 million Chinese watched some part of the finals on Monday 5th June 2017!
The seventh game was played until the score of 12-10, gained the highest views. At 20:57 China Central Time, just before the end of the seventh game, there were 28 million Chinese watching the game on CCTv-5, which was the peak moment of the game.
The most thrilling finals in the history of World Championships on Monday 5th June hiked up the overall number of unique viewers (Chinese who watched the event at least once on CCTV-5 during the past week) significantly from the previous day to more than 30 million new viewers.
The Championships were broadcasted for six days on CCTV and it reached a record number of 202 million total unique views. This number is hoped to grow slightly again with the numerous replays to be aired this week.
Subscription ticket is valid for the 3 days.
Source:
http://www.ticketmaster.be/event/liebherr-mens-world-cup-2017-subscription-tickets/21475
