When the 40-year-old Timo Boll came to his singles on Sunday lunchtime, the rock anthem “Smells like teen spirit” boomed from the speakers in Dortmund’s Helmut-Körnig-Halle. So you have a sense of humor in the table tennis Bundesliga. Four sentences later, however, Boll had a good laugh himself. He actually exudes a youthful spirit even in advanced athletic age. His 3-1 victory over the ten years younger Chinese Shang Kun meant the groundbreaking 2-1 lead for Borussia Düsseldorf. In the end, the German record champions won the Bundesliga playoff final against last year’s winner 1. FC Saarbrücken 3-1. With that, Boll and Borussia made their fourth joint triple perfect. After 2010, 2011 and 2018 they won the championship, cup and Champions League again within one season. No German club had ever won four triples in any sport.
At 1:29 p.m. and after a total playing time of just two and three quarters hours, the Düsseldorf team danced the 74th title for their club: 31 championships, 27 cup victories and 16 European cup triumphs. The latest triple comes as a surprise after the Düsseldorfers had not won a single trophy for around two and a half years between May 2018 (championship) and December 2020 (Champions League) and thus not a single trophy over two seasons.
The fact that they are so regained is due to the fit Boll as well as the sporting heights of their two Swedes Kristian Karlsson, 29, and Anton Källberg, 23. The latter is the best player in the Bundesliga with a season record of 29-2 wins; in all three competitions he even comes to a balance of 40: 3. “Anton is the shooting star this season,” enthused Borussia’s boss Andreas Preuss. “It feels incredibly good,” he said on Sunday afternoon about the championship and the resulting triple: “Not only had we not won a title for two years, we weren’t in any final during that time.”
For the national coach, Timo Boll is the Roger Federer of table tennis
All the more relieved and downright euphoric, Borussia’s staff drove home to Düsseldorf in the late afternoon to enjoy a winners banquet in the training hall in a manageable circle. “Unfortunately we couldn’t celebrate our successes with the fans,” said Preuss, “so we have to win titles again next year to catch up.”
After the Düsseldorf team had already won the Champions League, which was held in compressed format in Düsseldorf due to Corona, 3-1 against Saarbrücken last December, they repeated their dominance on neutral ground in Dortmund. The Slovenian Darko Jorgic had brought Saarbrücken 1-0 lead against Karlsson in the only tight five-set match, but the ensuing singles dominated with Källberg (3-1 against Patrick Franziska), Boll and again Källberg (3-1 against Jorgic) from Düsseldorf.
That it hardly got really exciting was the only drawback of this table tennis event. Five of the six players are in the top 53 of the world rankings. With the exception of the Chinese Shang Kun, everyone will meet again at the European Individual Championships in Warsaw at the end of the month. Boll from Düsseldorf and Franziska from Saarbrücken will then play for Germany in doubles.
The EM is the dress rehearsal for the Olympic table tennis tournament at the end of July / beginning of August in Tokyo. In the late autumn of his career, Boll would like to finally win his first individual Olympic medal in his sixth Olympic participation. The national coach Jörg Roßkopf does not believe that it will be Boll’s last Olympic chance. “Timo will play for a long time,” says Roßkopf, “for me he is the Roger Federer of table tennis.”
The fifth triple could also follow for Düsseldorf next season. Because the trio of Boll, Källberg and Karlsson will stay with Borussia. Just like Franziska, Kun and Jorgic near Saarbrücken. There is much evidence of a repetition of this endgame. The cards will then certainly be reshuffled depending on the form of the day.
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