KINGSLAYER! Lashin Elsayed Does the Unthinkable!

The King is dead. Long live the King! Kingslayer Lashin Elsayed pulls off the unlikeliest of upsets, an early season contender for Upset of the Year?

October 28, 2023. We at MajorPonghead knew that it couldn’t last forever, that the Mighty Kou Lei would eventually falter, if only for a single game, to one of his would-be usurpers. After his 9-0 start (6-0 on a bad ankle, no less) in singles and 20-10 in Golden Game points, we were left shaking our heads in silent acknowledgment of his complete iron-fisted dominance. Long live the King, we muttered, long may he sit upon The Iron Throne. We looked towards today’s match between Portland and Seattle for the possibility of a Nikhil Kumar v Kou Lei matchup, for the first opportunity of denting King Kou’s golden armor. And if that wasn’t to be, perhaps it would even require us to bide our time quietly in the shadows of Casterly Rock, until such time as the Cross Division matchup in late November/early December, when the Eastern Division upstarts such as Enzo Alles, Daniel Gorak, Damien Provost or Jinxin Wang would get their shot. But no, the unthinkable has happened.

He has gone by many names. The Pharoah, The Arab Lion. He’s been a mainstay of the Egyptian national team, a 3-time Olympian, an African Cup champion, a 3-time Arab Championship winner. But last night, under the MLTT spotlight in a pivotal matchup against the undefeated Kou Lei, Lashin Elsayed cast all these other monikers aside and became known as THE KINGSLAYER. Shocking the world, the 43-year old veteran employed a combination of savvy and power to unthrone Kou Lei by the score of 7, 8, -9. If you simply cannot believe it, we suggest you go and watch this match, which we are now referring to as The Red Match, at 1:47 into the live stream video here.

It would prove to be a pivotal win as well, closing the match score gap to 8-7 and giving his team the Bay Area Blasters huge momentum going into the Golden Game which they eventually won 21-6 (The Kingslayer was 5-2 in the GG against a resurgent Jiwei Xia).

It goes without saying that this match will be this weekend’s Majorponghead Upset of the Week, and certainly a leading contender for MLTT’s Upset of the Year award.

Oh that expression…take a look at the last thing that The Kingslayers’ victims see before he dispatches them to the afterlife.