Chinese Women's B Team Members Compete for Promotion

Fan Siqi (top right), Guo Yan (top left), Sun Mingyang (bottom right) and Guo Yuhan (bottom left)

While the top Chinese women are competing at 2018 Team World Cup in London, 12 of the B Team members are competing at an internal round robin from 23-25 February to earn their chance to compete at the A Team Promotion Competition.


Final Standings


Fan Siqi and Guo Yan, ending up top 2, will be competing at the A Team promotion competition alongside with the bottom 3 A Team members (Liu Fei, Liu Xi and Zhang Qiang) and top 2 B Team members (Sun Mingyang and Guo Yuhan) ranked according to their singles performance at 2017 CTTSL.

Photo: 乒乓世界

Fan Siqi led the leaderboard in the round robin with 9 wins and 2 losses. The 20-year-old has an outstanding performance at the 2017 Chinese National Games, winning every match in the team event and earned herself a nickname 'the solid third singles'. Her teammate Guo Yan, born in 1997, not to be confused with world champion Guo Yan from Beijing, placed second in the internal competition with 8 wins and 3 losses over Liu Ming and Li Jiayuan by the slenderest margin. Both of them are solid players from the champion-winning team at the 2017 Chinese National Games and had won critical points for Team Sichuan at the semifinals (Fan Siqi at part 3 and Guo Yan at part 5).

Watch: 2017 Chinese National Games: Women's Team Semifinals
Beijing 2-3 Sichuan [Full Match: Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

If you have followed 2017 CTTSL, you should have heard of Sun Mingyang (1999-born) and Guo Yuhan (2000-born) as they are ranked top 2 among Team B members according to their singles performance at 2017 CTTSL. Sun Mingyang had carried Bayi Jingbo in the 2017 CTTSL season and played many singles matches for the team. Her short-pips backhand pushes and her power are outstanding. Guo Yuhan from Beijing Shougang had quite many opportunities to play at CTTSL with Ding Ning held back in the CTTSL season. Guo Yuhan's backhand counter and switch lines are exceptional but her problems of inexperience and lack of versatility reveal when she encounters top Chinese players.

Here is a match between Sun Mingyang and Guo Yuhan at round 6 of 2017 CTTSL.

There are no videos about the internal competitions but there will be more updates on the upcoming A Team promotion competition on this blog. Stay tuned!