Table tennis
Saarbrücken wins Champions League
Was the decisive man of the final weekend: Saarbrücken’s Darko Jorgic. photo
© Tom Weller/dpa/archive image
The four best table tennis teams in Europe determined the Champions League winners over the Easter weekend. In the end, the host, defending champion and Bundesliga first team, wins.
1. FC Saarbrücken has it again Won the table tennis Champions League. At the final tournament in their own hall, the defending champion and Bundesliga table leader defeated the German champions Borussia Düsseldorf 3-2 in the final.
The decisive man of the final weekend was the Slovenian Darko Jorgic. The 25-year-old had already won the fifth match against Dimitrij Ovtcharov the day before in the 3-2 semi-final win against TTC Neu-Ulm. On Easter Monday, Jorgic got the first point for the FCS against Dang Qiu and the third point against Anton Källberg. In this decisive game he won in 3:2 sets and fended off two match points.
Because the German national player Patrick Franziska also won his game against Källberg, Saarbrücken quickly led 2-0. Borussia star Timo Boll (against Yuto Muramatsu) and individual European champion Dang Qiu (against Franziska) equalized to make it 2-2 for the 16-time European Cup winners from Düsseldorf.
The two long-term rivals of German table tennis met for the fourth time in a row in the Champions League final: Düsseldorf won in 2021 and 2022, and Saarbrücken won in 2023 and 2024.