World rankings are sometimes a good guide, but nothing more. Because it wasn’t a number that clenched its fist on Sunday after every point won, let out a scream and was driven by chants. If so, then this number would have been 198, and it would have been 62 that stumped the whole thing. But of course the fans didn’t shout “One hundred and ninety-eight”, but rather “Ki-li-an!”. Kilian Ort, 24-year-old self-grown from the table tennis first division club TSV Bad Königshofen, was just getting hot.
It was the third game of the season for Lower Franconia in a season that was increasingly torn by the pandemic, in which, for example, their Friday game against the TTF Ochsenhausen, which was affected by a corona case, was canceled. It was 2: 3 in the end, the guests from TTC Schwalbe Bergneustadt were better that evening by small things.
For the first home game with an audience 100 people had come, a tenth of what would be possible in this table tennis-crazy place; no beer, packaged food, huge spaces between seats. And yet it was loud. If Abdel-Kader Salifou hadn’t lost two unlucky sets at 12:14 and 13:15 in the 1: 3 against Benedikt Duda, it would have been a home win. Manager Andreas Albert found the access “actually convincing”. Salifou, who was one of the first TTBL professionals to survive a corona infection, is “80 percent” efficient. He lacked competitions.
If table tennis were mathematics, the hosts would not have had to compete. Duda (39), Robles and Stefan Fegerl (87) are all in the top 100 in the world, Bad Königshofens Bastian Steger (125), Salifou (179), the doubles Filip Zeljko (276) and Ort are partly far behind – although the old hands Steger and Fegerl have one thing in common that they were both in the top 20. Steger initially defeated Fegerl 3: 1, later lost to match winner Duda 1: 3. In the final doubles, the guests offered the more effective duo. After the opening win against Fulda, TSV has now lost two games.
Local victory against the Spaniard Robles was a strong signal for his club. Often thrown back from wounds, Ort has never reached 150 in the world, yet he recently missed Fulda’s access Quadri Aruna, his TTBL premiere, number 20 in the world. On Sunday, following a tough association training course, he didn’t give Robles a chance. At 11: 8, 11: 7, 11: 6, he did not show any weaknesses in the short game over the table, nor on the backhand side, where he acted variably, with placed counterattacks and brave flips. Set clever returns. As soon as the first of his aggressive forehand topspins came, he didn’t let Robles out of his grip: he let the Spaniard run, defend, often react helplessly until he got the point. “World class,” said the commentators on the live stream. Manager Albert predicted Ort, if he was not injured, for the first time a positive result in the best league in Europe: “That was stronger than ever,” he enthused, “from the concentration to the body language.”
Of course, Albert warns that it remains to be seen whether the season can even go through. His club, for example, has so far been lucky that neither the Croatian Zeljko nor the Frenchman Salifou have come from hotspots. On Sunday (3 p.m.), Corona wants Salifous ex-club TTC Neu-Ulm to come to the derby.
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