So a couple of things that people need to remember when they make these posts about getting rid of Hayata.
The first is that neither SYS or WMY came. We saw the last time WMY played Sato, who has better WTTC results than Hashimoto this year.
The second thing is that HH played the only player on the CNT who will likely be on the main team, and a player who after SYS and WMY matches up with her pretty well. So she didn't just play anyone on the CNT, she played the best player on the CNT at this event, who was probably put in the slot because the CNT was hoping she would play Hashimoto, which probably says a lot.
Finally, Hayata is not *selected*. Hayata qualifies by ranking. And even for this match, she played outside her slot, which means she agreed with the team agenda. Maybe she was hoping for Chen Yi but she got Kuai Man regardless. In any case, she is not going to win easily vs the CNT, she has been the dominant non-CNT player since after the Tokyo Olympics until the emergence of Miwa Harimoto.
All of which is to say that for a country like Japan, it sets a bad precedent if you start with the argument that a player who is playing better than their teammates in just about every measurable way should not be allowed to play. Remember, Hayata did not play Wang Yidi or Chen Yi and she may very well have lost to them, but neither of them are likely to be on LA 2028, She played the only player who is likely to be in LA 2028. She did what she does but it clearly wasn't good enough. But the ramifications of saying that a player who qualifies to play should not be selected to play based on objective measures has ramifications that even China cannot fully avoid in modern times. As long as you can come up with a qualification criteria that is reasonable and objective and that allows everyone to understand its basis, whether it be weighting heavier for all players losses to CNT players etc., that is better than just targeting Hayata because it is the cool thing these days. Even in China now, they pick the players that win the internal trials or the ones that qualify by WR or even when the rules were changed to remove Wang Yidi, the new standard ended up hurting Wang Manyu. So it wasn't just remove WYD, it was a new points system that was applied and when WMY failed it, it wasn't adjusted to only target WYD.
So it is not just *team morale*, it is the team concept of meritocracy that gets affected when you drop a player who has outperformed their peers. Such things ruin countries. It requires more than just targetting one play, and it is much easier for an event like this when you have 5 players on a team and harder for events like the Olympics when all 3 players are required.
