European Team Table Tennis Championship: All the countries that Greece faced in the quarter-finals

All four national teams that were in the groups of Greece at the European Table Tennis Team Championship in Malmö reached the quarter-finals of the competition. In fact, two of these groups, Hungary among the men and Spain among the women, had entered the table of “16” with the second place from the fourth and eighth groups respectively, that is, they were not among the favorites of the first round.

Also in the first eight were the leader in the group of the men’s Greek team, Portugal, and the “host” Sweden, who was the leader in the group of the women’s Greek team. It is something that does not happen often in a top competition for two teams from the same men’s and women’s group to progress to the quarter-finals and is clearly further evidence that Greece had a very difficult task in Malmö to be in one of the top two places and pass on the board.

Also of note, Portugal took a 3-0 set against the Czech Republic, while Hungary and Spain got a win each from their three athletes respectively to reach the final against England and Luxembourg respectively (Adam Zudi , Tamas Lakatos, Benke Majoros and Maria Xiao, Sofia Xuan Zhang and Maria Berthosa).

Otherwise, the favorites advance to Malmö, the eights are on Friday and according to the predictions we are going for semi-finals between Germany-Portugal and France-Sweden for the men and Germany-Portugal or Sweden and France-Romania for the women.

In the order in which the teams appear on the scoreboards, the results of the first round were:

In men:

Germany-Ukraine 3-0

Croatia-Slovakia 3-1

Denmark-Romania 3-0

Czech Republic-Portugal 0-3

France-Slovenia 3-2

Poland-Belgium 2-3

England-Hungary 2-3

Sweden-Austria 3-0

To women:

Germany-Ukraine 3-0

Italy-Czech Republic 3-2

Sweden-Poland 3-1

Croatia-Portugal 1-3

France-Austria 3-0

Slovakia-Hungary 3-1

Luxembourg-Spain 1-3

Serbia-Romania 1-3

Men’s quarter-final pairings:

Germany-Croatia

Denmark-Portugal

France-Belgium

Hungary-Sweden

And for women:

Germany-Italy

Sweden-Portugal

France-Slovakia

Spain-Romania