European Individual Table Tennis Championship: In the positions 33-64 of the simple Angelakis, Sgouropoulos, Tolios

Both Yannis Sgouropoulos and Konstantinos Angelakis among the men, as well as Katerina Toliou among the women, were eliminated in the first round, however their appearances left room for smiles. All of them faced superior opponents.

Greek participation now continues with the men’s doubles, where Angelakis and his Slovakian teammate, Wang Yang, face Cedric Nutink/Lubomir Pistei from Belgium and Slovakia respectively on Friday. The match starts at 10:30 Greek time on table 3.

In the first round of the men’s singles, Angelakis faced on Thursday night Danish 2023 World Championship singles quarter-finalist Anders Lind, while Sgouropoulos met two-time European singles champion and European record holder in Olympic medals, German Dimitri Ovcharov.

Angelakis (number 84 in the tournament) proved his class and threatened throughout the match the number 11 of the competition. He responded immediately to the Dane’s lead, making impressive moves after the middle of the set and, always relying on his strong spin, started the third set 5-1. Leading and 7-4, the Dane equalized and the set was decided in the details. An elusive “sori” by the Scandinavian at 8-8 for example, a missed attack by our champion at 10-9 and the opportunity to turn the match around was lost…

The upset in the third set added ease of movement to Lind, who continued to create problems on serve and was more accurate on offense. Angelakis’ tactics did not work, he fell behind 3-1 and came back strong in the next set.

With tremendous energy and faith he managed to go 9-7 and hold serve, but there too he ran out of luck. Ballia net and the Dane inside, two mistakes from the role of receiver and Lind took a deep breath for the final 4-1, congratulating the Greek for his performance (8-11, 11-7, 9-11, 5- 11 and 9-11).

A little earlier, Sgouropoulos (No. 55) started his match in the second round as a clear outsider. Opposite him was the great Dimitri Ovcharov (No. 6), with whom in June they celebrated the title of Olympiakos in A1. After the three victories and the qualification on the scoreboard, the four-time European champion of the youth categories wanted first of all to stand worthy against the top competition level.

He succeeded, as he was competitive for most of the race. He lost 4-1 sets, but pressed at several points and, of course, provided a spectacle with some big rallies and impressive offensive actions.

Ovtrarov took the lead by a large margin and was in control in the second set as well. Sgouropoulos improved his performance and strongly claimed the third set. He finally dropped in the fourth set, while in the next he had the German star (European champion, world runner-up and six-time Olympic champion) at 9-9 with a series of points. However, he lost two receptions and the match ended there (3-11, 5-11, 8-11, 11-4, 9-11).

In the women’s singles, Toliou (No. 72) entered the table with no anxiety to try her best against a top European, Nina Mittelham (No. 4). She had achieved, through two qualifying phases, the goal of entering the main draw and wanted to test her capabilities against a superior opponent. The German with four European gold medals, in addition to her enormous class, also has great fluency against the defense and prevailed with a 4-0 set.

Toliou did not lag behind, in fact with their quality defenses they “forced” Mittelham into mistakes several times, they just couldn’t chase many more things (6-11, 7-11, 6-11, 7-11).