The Japan Table T-League was in full swing on 1 March, with the Ryukyu Club led by Harimoto Tomokazu blasting their way to a 4-0 win over the underdog Shizuoka team, while the Nippon Life Club with Harimoto Tomokazu at its core was defeated by the mediocre Nagoya team, 2-3. Hayata Hina, who was recovering from a long illness, narrowly beat Ando Minami 3-2 in the second set before losing in the deciding set. She lost 0-1 to Ando Minami (in a special format) and was unable to lead her team to victory, see below for more details.
The 2024-2025 season of the Japan T-League, which lasted for seven months, is now coming to an end, and the competition is heating up as all the battles of the season are scheduled to end in March.
On the men’s side, Ryukyu Club, a former champion and this year’s favourite to win the gold medal, took the court again to face Shizuoka on March 1, in which Harimoto Tomokazu, though he took the court only once, won the crucial second set of singles, winning 3-1 after a 4-game battle with Shizuoka Club’s number one player Masataka Morioka, dealing a severe blow to the other team’s morale.
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In addition to Harimoto Tomokazu, the rest of the Ryukyu players also played bravely, with World Champion veteran Masaharu Yoshimura making the most of her appearance, defeating Mori En Masatoshi/Machi Hidetori 2-0 in the first doubles set alongside South Korean foreigner Seung-min Cho, and then 3-1 in the third singles set to beat Kazutoshi Hamada, while Ryukyu’s Daiden Shinozuka (a mainstay of the Paris Olympics in the JPN) swept Shizuoka’s Higashitora Ryugasaki 3-0 in the fourth set of the singles set to close out the match! The tournament was thus completed.
On the women’s side, five-time champions Nippon Life Club have been unlucky of late, with their top star Hayata Hina, the world’s fifth-ranked player, rushing back to the court after a two-week bout with a low-grade fever that had only just cleared up, and failing to reach her best form as a result.
In the match against Nagoya, Nippon Life’s Akane Uesawa/Akira Sasao were defeated 1-2 in the first doubles set by Yaoko Nagao/Eugenia Minami, Hayata Hina nearly collapsed in the second set, and finally defeated Ando Minami 3-2, Natsuki Akae lost 2-3 to Kasumura Kimura in the third, and in the fourth set, Chinese Taipei’s world second runner-up, Zheng Yijing, won 3-0 against Eugenia Minami to help Nippon Life equalise the total score. the overall score.
According to the T-League rules, only one game was needed in the fifth set, and then the two athletes, who had only played each other for a short period of time, played again, but this time Hayata Hina lost 6-11, failing to beat Ando Minami again, and the Nippon Life team thus ended the match with a 2-3 total score loss.
