Gerasimato also started this year’s matches in a foreign league

Ioanna Gerasimatou is the last member of our national table tennis teams, who made this year’s premiere in an interclub championship abroad.

This weekend, 25 and 26/11, he participated with Comfort in the opening matches of the 1st national division of Bulgaria.

Her team is defending last year’s title and began its quest with four wins in as many matches in Sofia. The current champion of Greece in women’s singles collaborates for the second year in a row with the Bulgarian club and was highly effective in the first two days in all the matches she played in singles and doubles. In other European leagues in the meantime, teams of Greek internationals were pitted against each other, it just didn’t happen to record “civil wars”. Also, the interclub championship of the 2nd national category of North Macedonia deserves a mention, not so much because it has a Greek presence, but because there is the unusual setting of the teams being mixed, i.e. consisting of men and women!

In Bulgaria, there are 10 teams in the women’s top division and they compete in two unseeded rounds. They gather in one gym at a time and play four matches each. Comfort beat CSKA Sofia and Dve Mogili 4-0 yesterday Saturday, while today Sunday they defeated Stamboliyski 4-0 and Pi Pong Sofia 4-1. Gerasimatou started by participating in doubles and in the second match she had 1 single and 1 double. Today, as the 1st player, she gave two singles in the last match of the program and in general she had two more games in doubles and one in singles. She managed to win 3-0 sets in all meetings, with the exception of the second match against Pi Pong Sofia, which was decided in four sets.

From the major European championships, in which Greek aces take part, we had a midweek match in Sweden, where Yiannis Sgouropoulos’ Eslov met with Konstantinos Angelakis’ Sparwagen. For the 5th matchday of Pingisligan Herrar, the home team Eslov won 4-1 and there was no need for the 6th separate match where the athletes of our national team would compete. Sgouropoulos had earlier defeated Harald Anderson 3-1 in a set, while Angelakis had lost to English international Tom Jervis 3-1. In the standings, Eslov is 2nd with 11 points, Sparwagen 6th with 6, while in 4th place with 10 points is the Record of Konstantinos Konstantinopoulos, who continued with two more positive results (against the Swedish Simon Soderlund and the Portuguese Andre Silva) in 4-1 against Munkendal. By the way, in the corresponding Swedish women’s league, Juno is 5th after four matches (2 points) with Dimitra-Thomaida Tsekoura already having five individual victories to her credit. Last week, Panagiotis Gionis’ Bogoria and Giorgos Stamatourou’s Gdansk faced off in the Polish men’s league. The first was imposed 3-0, Gionis had one victory, however Stamatouros was absent and no “civil war” occurred.

In North Macedonia, where the paradox occurs with mixed teams, Nikos Grammenos has been successfully testing his strength since last year. The athlete from Thessaloniki, who is the marketing manager of E.F.O.E.P.A., competes in Mega Spin Astraion, which is based in Strumnitsa.

The team competes in the A2 division, where there are no separate leagues for men and women and both genders play together! Already the Greek athlete, who has been helping his team as much as possible since last year and was the second best in the championship (regardless of whether Astraion finished 3rd and could not move up), has faced female athletes this year.

In the middle of November, Astraion played its last matches, overcame Radovis and Borets 4-1 and with the absolute in nine matches is the autumn champion. On an individual level, Grammenos started and continues only with victories this year, also Boris Sekulov remains undefeated from the team.