Notorious for screaming “’ey!” four times: Prithika Pavade
Table tennis on TV is such a thing. It almost never works anywhere, anywhere. During the team World Cup, which recently took place in Busan (South Korea), and in which the Germans were at least in the quarter-finals, there was next to nothing, nowhere. In the end, Japan for the women and France for the men almost managed the sensation of dethroning “the mighty China” (comment on YouTube) in the final. It would have been as if Borussia Dortmund had managed to win the championship trophy instead of Bayern once in the past eleven years.
Even on the internet there wasn’t much to be found in the last few rounds, not even illegal. The ITTF, the world association, has played a lot on its own YouTube channel, but not everything. Where things got exciting, things were shot: rights at Dazn or somewhere else.
What’s the point, apart from the money for the transfer? If you look at a few games on the net, you might come up with the following ideas: It’s not because the balls are too small, the nets are too deep or the tables are too small; It’s not because of the counting method either. It’s because table tennis is a game of seconds, a game that lasts an average of twenty minutes. A rally is history in four seconds. Before you think about what happened, the point is gone.
But the surrounding circumstances are also telling. Nowadays you have to be careful not to speak out against discrimination by using medical or psychological terms. So I don’t want to talk about autism or obsessive-compulsive neuroses, but perhaps about tics, about whims, about nerdisms, because professional table tennis seems to be heavily influenced by them: the dead-serious referees who move the clock to the right position during a time-out players dancing in place before each point; her hand swab on the plate near the net, which brings with it many an involuntary encounter; the towel thing. Everyone is constantly cleaning everything. There are towel breaks after the twelfth point.
And then after every point there is screaming, shouting or “ho!” The Japanese Harimoto Tomokazu is the worst: Monica Seles was a prudish Victorian in comparison. Enervating. The young Frenchwoman Prithika Pavade managed to scream “‘ey!” four times before (!) every ball, to whomever and why.
Experts like most official commentators can still do a lot with what is offered. And players like Pavade are of course a feast for the eyes because they play powerfully and energetically.
And Fan Zhendong is beyond all doubt anyway.
