It will not be entirely unimaginable. After all, the great sponsor Akihiko Kotani is there; the even bigger coach Koji Itagaki; And if you take a look at the training center of table tennis first league team TSV Bad Königshofen, you will see many Japanese guest players there. But: The small first division artery of the Lower Franconian association will still not belong to a single professional from Japan from the coming season. In numbers: zero. And that’s close to a world sensation.
For last Saturday, the TSV invited to a mysterious presentation to the local Gasthof Schlundhaus, in which he then presented the man who will take the last free place in the future squad: it is called Daniel Habeshn and does not go through even for fleeting observers as a Japanese . Especially not when he opens his mouth. The 38-year-old is an Austrian, with a shorn scalp and Viennese dialect.
It is likely to be allowed, there must be other Lower Franconian sports clubs without Japanese professionals, but this special one has only started for a single year without a Japanese since the 2015/16 second division season. In 2020/21 it was – a gap torn by Corona. Otherwise (for interested): Mizuki Oikawa. Kazuhiro Yoshimura. Koudai Hiraya. Akito iTagaki. Yukiya Uda. And currently: Jin Ueda. It leads too far to tell again how crazy coincidence this strange liaison came about, it brought TSV sporting success and special attention in the island state.
Habsohn is a fighter, “a superfair athlete” and a good double player, explains team manager Albert
Habsohn is probably also there, but certainly no stranger in Germany. He was twice in doubles and once with the team of European champions, he won the Champions League, and when his future club was first rising to the table tennis Bundesliga (TTBL) in 2017, Habsohn was already there. Then as now, he played for Mühlhausen. His transfer was not planned for a long time, on the contrary. Only immediately before the latest TTBL home game of TSV Bad Königshofen against Düsseldorf had registered, whereupon the Lower Franconia spontaneously threw other plans over their pile and agreed with Habsohn on a one-year commitment.
He is a fighter, “a superfair athlete”, a good double player, team manager Andreas Albert, explains with a hop or top tendency always good for spectacle and occasionally for winning beats behind his back. Habesohn’s vita also leaves little doubt. If it weren’t for his second half of the season last season: 0: 7. Or his current: 2: 9, one of the worst in the league.
Again, it is not entirely without risk what the sporting management is doing, but that is in a different tradition of this club: In that of the Kroaten Filip Zeljko, for example, which was kept, even when he had once flown and modeled from the national squad ; Belgian Martin Allegro, whom you continued, even after completing a second TTBL year without any individual victory; Or the Ueda, who had a kind of burnout to Lower Franconia in summer, and which was part of the old iron at home. Albert and colleagues often see whether the type of person fits their club. The sporty has still been added.
In any case, the fourth man will now be his besides Zeljko, veteran Bastian Steger and 19-year-old access Andre Bertelsmeier, who has just climbed the top 100 in the world. As Steger, who has long ended his international career, also wants to withdraw from the WTT series tournament marathon largely. They have been driven there, he says, and as a family man with two children, he no longer wanted to do that. Manager Albert likes this, he attributes the current success of his team to the fact that two regular players can currently concentrate entirely on league operations in Steger and Ueda – an advantage over the often fought competition.
Incidentally, there is an explanation for Habesohn’s weakness. He completed a master’s degree, he had final exams during the performance plate. And his request was as spontaneous as the following agreement. Bad Königshofen has always been an association that had appealed to him, he says, and when he was sitting against Düsseldorf in front of the livestream of the game, he thought: Even if their squad was certainly full (” Japanese “), he could have asked at least once. So he typed a quick message. Six days later he was the surprise guest in the Schlundhaus.
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