Our athletes are back in action as table tennis team competitions get underway

Australian table tennis Olympians are about to return to the court as the Men’s and Women’s Team events get underway at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gymnasium today.

The Women’s team will be up first, facing no.3-seeded Germany at 3.30pm AEST, while the Men’s team will take on Japan tomorrow Monday 2 August at 11am AEST.

The Team event format consists of a Doubles match followed by two Singles matches. Additional Single matches are then contested, if necessary, until a team wins three matches. Each match in the Team event is decided in a best-of-five-games fashion.  

Both Australian teams will face a tough match-up, with their opponents featuring multiple Olympic Games, World Championships and Continental event medal winners in their ranks. 

Olympic debutant Michelle Bromley is the new face in the Australian women’s team compared to Rio 2016, replacing Ziyu Zhang and playing alongside Melissa Tapper and Jian Fang Lay. 

Lay might get a rematch against Ying Han, who defeated her 4-0 in their Women’s Singles third-round encounter last Tuesday. The expert German trio of Han, Shan and Solja won the silver medal in the Team event at the Rio 2016 Olympics, the only non-Asian team to have claimed a medal in this event.

The men’s squad face an even bigger challenge against no. 3 seed Japan, a team that boasts one of the newly-crowned Olympic champions from the mixed doubles event in Jun Mizutani. Him and Niwa were also members of the team who took silver in this event at the Olympic Games Rio 2016, losing 3-1 to China in the final. 18-year-old up-and-coming talent Tomokazu Harimoto rounds up the team for Tokyo. 

The Australian men’s team is unchanged from the last Olympic Games, with Heming Hu, Chris Yan and David Powell all representing Australia in the event for the second time. 

An overall win for either team, or even a success in any of the individual match-ups, would make history as no Australian player has ever won a contest within the Team event since the format was introduced at the Olympic Games in 2008.