I also went to the championships for the last two days and here are some thoughts about what I've seen :
- First of all, at the moment, table tennis is much more of a sport to be played than a sport to be watched. I feel that the tribunes could've been closer to the main table, the buffer between spectators and players was quite big, and the atmosphere was really good only for 2 or 3 matches, the others were very quiet.
- Was expecting much more from the brands' booths at the venue. People were saying that you can find lots of great deals there but what I actually saw there were brands that were getting rid of old equipment by selling it at a somewhat lower price and trying to sell their newest things at the usual prices. To sum it up, it is not different from the deals that you see on an ordinary table tennis shop like tabletennis11. Also, I haven't seen any exclusive items or something like that, Butterfly didn't even sell balls with the stamp of the championships.
P.S. I haven't followed closely TT News as of late, when did Butterfly manage to make a rubber that costs 80 euros?
- Agree with Shathe regarding food price and animations, and also regarding match schedule in the last days - it definitely should not be a burden for those who advance on all fronts, but at the same time we were paying for each session, and not for a day's ticket - and that meant that I had to buy more tickets(in each of the cases where I bought a ticket I was interested in one of the matches, and didn't quite care about the other match in the session). That led to the fact that on Saturday, there was a great atmosphere for the men's SF, but the WD SF were played almost like in a library.
- The commentary in the hall was quite bad - two guys were making some cheap analysis of the set that had just ended while the players were in their corners preparing for the next one. I don't think it is ok that a player has to hear the commentator analysing his game during the break between sets.
- Women's doubles matches were better and much more watchable than I thought - longer rallies and some really great exchanges. Even though initially I wasn't interested in them, I am happy to say I was wrong to disconsider WD.
- The Swedish fans are very cool guys - they really created a great atmosphere for Mattias Falck's matches. The Chinese have also done very well to encourage their players. (I hope we also did our part for Ionescu/Robles)
- Even if the quality of the game was much better, it felt lifeless in the crowd when no european player was involved.
- The mistake at 2-2 and 9-9 in WD final was quite bad, not because of the mistake itself, the umpire is also human after all, but because the replays are not used to decide on such important calls. Right after the decision there appeared a slow-mo replay on the big screens where you could see that the ball was not even close to the table, and yet they decided to replay the point. The boos from the crowd have been really, really loud.
- Taking part in such an event is really cool, because you get to meet the legends :