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World of Sport

12th Jan 2015

Video: This curling, backhand, around-the-net winner is table tennis at its finest

Wonderful

Sean Nolan

A true thing of beauty

Professional table tennis is a long way from the entertaining, but ugly, games that kept us amused in youth clubs and school back in the day. While we were just happy to just get the ball across the net and onto the other side, the pros employ a range of spins and swerves that make their encounters a physics-bending lesson in just how much ‘action’ you can get on a tiny plastic ball.

Thanks to the good folks at Reddit, and to player Johan Hagberg who uploaded it to YouTube, this video of the Swede’s winner in a recent game is the perfect example of some superb swerve being used to win a point in a highly unexpected way.

However, as Johan points out rather starkly in the video’s description, despite this moment of magic, he didn’t win the match.

‘I lost the match though, fuck,’ is how he put it.