Africa’s hope in the singles event of the 2017 ITTF World Championships was extinguished on Thursday June 1, after Nigeria’s Aruna Quadri and Egypt’s Omar Assar were shown exit in the competition.
As the best players from Africa, all hope has been tied to these super stars but things turned out awful as they played their last match of the competition.
It was Egypt’s Omar Assar that fell first but the African champion did not leave without a fight against Hong Kong’s Chun Ting Wong.
Playing with a lot of confidence, Omar Assar started well against his superior opponent who is rated seventh in the world but things were not the same for Assar as he fell 4-2 to his opponent.
Unlike Assar, Quadri could not contain the ferocious left-hand of Denmark’s Jonathan Groth in the match played on the centre court of the competition.
Despite starting well, things seem to have gone awry for Quadri as he fell 12-14, 9-11, 5-11, 6-11 (4-0) to the Danish.
However, Assar took some lessons from the competition which he described as the gathering of the world’s best.
Assar spoke after losing in the round of 16 of mixed doubles said: “We wanted to at least make it to the medal zone having won several titles in Africa. We trained well and having been working together as teammates and we wanted to show that Africa can compete with the world’s best. Unfortunately we lost to the Spaniards but we are satisfied with our performance in the mixed doubles event. Generally, African players have shown that they are not pushovers with Aruna Quadri and myself now playing more with the best players in Europe and we are still young. We hope we can get up there and compete more with the best at this stage of the sport.”