GOLDEN MOMENTS ABOUND! QUICK RECAP OF AMAZING MOMENTS FROM DAY 1 & 2
September 23, 2023. Check back tomorrow for a more detailed article about this weekend’s play, but here’s a quick pictorial run through of the four golden moments of victory thus far in days 1 and 2. It’s just been too freaking exciting for us to wait until Sunday’s matches are over! The fortunes of teams and individual players have gone up and down so quickly, it’s been dizzying, with Friday’s losers becoming Saturday’s heroes. Watch the replay of all the action to date (and today’s matches) here.
GIANTSLAYER! Portland Paddlers’ Tyrese Knight set the tone for the weekend with a brilliant, balls-out counterloop winner against Seattle’s world #39 Adiya Sareen, and shows the oft-buttoned up table tennis world the proper way to celebrate. EPIC. That’s how we do it in Barbados!!!!!
In the Friday nightcap, hometown Bay Area Blasters’ took the 21-19 win in the Golden Game when Lily Zhang served up some sorcery and aced Texas Smash’s Darryl Tsao at 20-19. You know it’s exciting when even the Kaiser Permanente Arena staff, used to high flying Golden State Warriors’ G-League action, are flabbergasted and cheering!
“The Edge Heard Round the World” On Friday night, the lasting image for Texas was Darryl Tsao’s head buried in his hands, heartbroken and distraught after losing the last point of the Golden Game. Less than 24 hours later, Tsao redeems himself with a blistering down-the-line forehand loop at 20-19, that clipped the edge just out of Isaac Vila Ortiz’s reach, smashing Portland’s hopes of going 2-0. Oh the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune!
Seriously, is somebody making this stuff up? Commissioner Flint Lane, is there someone writing a script for you? Isn’t there a writer’s strike happening?!? In the Saturday nightcap, Seattle’s Aditya Sareen - the victim on Friday of Tyrese Knight’s epic counterloop winner - silences the hometown crowd but sends his teammates into a barrier smashing frenzy as he closes out the Golden Game against Bay Area’s Elsayed Lashin. Note to Andrew Cao and Nikhil Kumar, we absolutely love it when barriers get smashed! Perhaps years from now we will look back and say that this is the moment that Coach Luba’s Seattle youth movement began in earnest.
