Photo courtesy of ITTF
Defeat is always hard to take

The year was 1989 and I was playing in the final of the Australian U/17 National Table Tennis Championships. I was unseeded for the event but had played extremely well to make the final. I wasn’t overly nervous about the match and all the pressure was on my opponent Mark Palmay as he was expected to win.

The First Set

Mark got away to a flyer winning point after point. Luckily for me the games were still up to 21 otherwise the set would have been over in 30 seconds. As it turned out, it didn’t take much longer and the first set was lost 21-4. What a devastating score line.

The Second (and last) Set

I was determined to dig in and put up a much better fight in the second set, however Mark once again took an early lead. I really needed to make a stand immediately or the match would be over. I managed to claw my way back to 9 all and thought I had won the next point to go ahead in the set for the first time. Unknown to me, the ball had clipped the edge and the point was awarded to Mark. The next 11 points were not memorable for me as I lost every one of them.

The Final Score

21-4 21-9 : A massive defeat!

Ding Song

Another big defeat that my doubles partner from the Sydney 2000 Olympics, Brett Clarke, keeps reminding me about, is when I played Ding Song of China in the 1997 Australian Open. It wasn’t the score line that made this a massive defeat but the way Ding Song played. In Brett’s words “He was looking at the crowd as he smashed your loops for winners”.

What is your biggest loss?

We’ve started up a What is Your Biggest Loss question in the Ask the Coach section of our website. Take a look and add your own massive table tennis loss to the list.