Gender clash piff-paff

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Good to see man proved his potency after all

Extremely sexist!! Care to put your life on the line for the best European male player v Chen mein, sun yinsha or wang manyu?!!

Don’t forget this was Chinese mens v womens. I highly doubt man’s potency would be proved if it was a player from any other nation!!

care to put your country’s best player against the Chinese women to prove his potency??!!

 

NDH

says Spin to win!
I’m going to stick my neck out here (at the risk of getting it chopped off) and suggest that there is a little “lost in translation” going on here.

The whole “men vs women” thing in sports is one of the most annoying topics in the whole of sport (foot stomping included! 😂)

Table Tennis is MUCH closer due to the nature of the sport, but mens biological advantage is still evident at the top of the sport.

More power and more speed are there for all to see. I don’t know why it needs to be some sort of sexist conspiracy?

It’s much more of a divide in other sports. Like the whole McEnroe/Serena thing…… The greatest Woman’s tennis player of all time would absolutely struggle against a man in the top 500 (at least). Having a serious conversation about it just does the Woman’s sport a disservice IMO.

The same can be seen in Football (soccer). I think the Australian Woman’s team were utterly destroyed by a boys under 16 team……

You have good and bad sports for both men and women, but I think Table Tennis is one of the rare sports where the viewing quality of both is superb, and there doesn’t need to be this comparison that Women can beat Men or Men can beat Women.
 
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On the same series of the posted video, the 3rd match was Ma Long vs Liu Shiwen.
Hell, I dare not say women are inferior to men, at least in table tennis. (the difference is maybe more evident in larger ball sports like football or basketball).
LSW stunned ML multiple times with her BH down the line. Same pattern, no answer from the Dragon until the 3rd or 4th set.

My personal experience, I got beaten by a twin brothers half my age few time ago (they beat me one after the other, #sad)

In short, I think table tennis is one of the rare sports where you should NEVER underestimate your opponent based on physical matters only (age, gender, height/weight). Do that and you'll be left red-faced more often than you'd expect.😅

I always play my opponent seriously - no fishing around, showboating, etc... be them elders, kids, wrinkly or fit, I do everything to try to win.
That is the highest respect you can give to them as a fellow player of the sport.
 
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I’m going to stick my neck out here (at the risk of getting it chopped off) and suggest that there is a little “lost in translation” going on here.

The whole “men vs women” thing in sports is one of the most annoying topics in the whole of sport (foot stomping included! 😂)

Table Tennis is MUCH closer due to the nature of the sport, but mens biological advantage is still evident at the top of the sport.

More power and more speed are there for all to see. I don’t know why it needs to be some sort of sexist conspiracy?

It’s much more of a divide in other sports. Like the whole McEnroe/Serena thing…… The greatest Woman’s tennis player of all time would absolutely struggle against a man in the top 500 (at least). Having a serious conversation about it just does the Woman’s sport a disservice IMO.

The same can be seen in Football (soccer). I think the Australian Woman’s team were utterly destroyed by a boys under 16 team……

You have good and bad sports for both men and women, but I think Table Tennis is one of the rare sports where the viewing quality of both is superb, and there doesn’t need to be this comparison that Women can beat Men or Men can beat Women.

Absolutely agree and take the Chinese women out of table tennis and yes there would be a big gap between the men and women but purely from the sport of TT and including the Chinese women the gap isn’t as great specially Chinese women v none Chinese men.

im from uk and I can’t say pitchford is superior to the Chinese women.

but in sport in general yes I agree with your comments. I certainly wouldn’t put the best female boxer against Mike Tyson 😳

 
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The entire conversation is of course speculation — until the average man and woman are physically equal, there is no point in them playing heavily physical sports together at a highly competitive level. It’s unfair. Basically everyone can agree on that.

I think the main reason men and women play differently in table tennis is the way of coaching. Obviously men can, broadly, hit a lot harder, but this will have far less of an effect with a tiny, uber light ball? M I’m no physicist, but a tennis ball struck at 90mph loses a lot less momentum than a ping pong ball struck at 60mph, surely?

For some reason, men and women are coached into different play styles. Men are taught to play a ‘powe style’ — using heavy looping (but increasingly flicking and power blocking) to get past the oppenent. Basically, a pure two winged looping power attacker — the shakehanders are hitting powerfully as the penholders on both wings.

Meanwhile, the women, despite the decreased importance of physical strength, are coached into a ‘speed style’: the boring ‘backhand punch block everything’ style which relies so heavily on the opponents speed. Thats why choppers continue to survive in the womens game — the women have been coached into playing a counter attacking style and struggle when they have to rely on their own speed and patience, to some extent. The men, pure attackers, just moose it past choppers.

There’s no reason why women can’t be coached into the same style as the men. I don’t like either modern attacking style, whether it’s the ‘backhand flick forever’ or ‘backhand punch forever’ style, but there’s no reason why the women can’t play the same way as the men, a few mph slower.

The issue in table tennis is that it is now an industrial process — champions are churned out like products on a production line. There is no uniqueness, flair or individuality in the style of most top pros now, male or female, Fan Zhendong or Chen Meng, Chinese, Euro-Jap or anyone else. If you watch the men, you watch a flicking war and then a winner, if you watch the women you get two backhand punchers who can’t obviously do anything else. It’s a sad spectacle for the aport when Koki Niwa, playin one chop block a game and getting hammered every matchbis thr best example of stylistic variation in table tennis. Take out the ridiculous ‘dignics’, ‘dna’, ‘omega 7’ ‘national boosted hurricane’ rubbers and the industrial, abusive way of training elite tt players and you will have a very different game.

Comparing tt to tennis, I believe, isn’t quite fair. Tennis is heavily reliant on serves — the top male servers serve at up to 140-150mph on their first serve, the average woman serves at ~100mph. I’d be willing to argue that Serena Williams could challenge most male pros (without the serve advantage), that’s a different conversation, but the serve aspect of tennis alone makes any broad comparison between the sports impossible.

As for football, lack of funding for womens football means there’s a lack of training and thus they aren’t nearly as good. Lack of funding = lack of talent identified + lack of advertising of the sport. Lack of talent + advertising = lack of interest. Lack of interest = lack of funding. It’s a vicious circle. When people throw billions around in a sport, funding matters and without it, women’s football is doomed to failure. Until the sports are treated with equal respect and interest, no fair comparison can really be made either. Table tennis, is, I believe, an far more equal sport than football will ever be, at least in this respect.

But old players, kids and women can always challenge in table tennis. Can women’s teams challenge men’s in football? No — we have seen that they can’t. Could a tennis equivalent of Harimoto or He Zhi Wen challenge prime Nadal in Tennis? Not a chance. Could they challenge most pros in Ping Pong? We have seen that they can and they thrive. That’s what makes tt the great sport it is and we should enjoy it.
 
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Generally men have an advantage at every sport because they cab generate more power and run faster too.

However I think table tennis is closer than many other sports because the bat and ball is very light. Still men will have more top end power but good women can play at a very high level, maybe like 200 ttr points lower at the top or so.

I also think really the modern men's game with the 40mm ball got closer to the women's game than like 10 years ago. Men's game used to be forehand dominated, farther from the table but now it is more backhand dominated closer to the table similar to the women's game.

The top chinese women are very good at this. If you watch those male vs female chinese games, men are still obviously a bit better especially if they are able to open up with their stronger forehand but when they are in the "trap" of the fast close table backhand cross table exchange the women can keep up very well with that and even the top chinese man have trouble to escape from that.

Still over a whole set the men will win because they are just stronger in some situations but close to the table those chinese girls are extremely strong.
 
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