The “TTBL Player of the Month December”: Shunsuke Togami from TTF Liebherr Ochsenhausen
TTBL fans were able to vote for their “TTBL Player of the Month for December” in a social media poll. After the last three match days of the TTBL first half of the season, six candidates were selected based on their strong performances (in alphabetical order): Tiago Apolonia (ASC Grünwettersbach), Benedikt Duda (TTC Schwalbe Bergneustadt), Kristian Karlsson (TTC OE Bad Homburg), Fanbo Meng (TTC RhönSprudel Fulda-Maberzell), Dang Qiu (Borussia Düsseldorf) and Shunsuke Togami (TTF Liebherr Ochsenhausen). Japanese Olympic participant Shunsuke Togami won every third vote in this poll.
Shunsuke Togami was already on fire just before the start of winter. With a magnificent end-of-season spurt of five wins in the last six singles matches of the first half of the season, the 23-year-old boosted his first-round record to 12-4 and catapulted himself to third place in the player rankings. None of Togami's colleagues from the German elite class was more successful last December.
However, the returnee was by no means up against run-of-the-mill opponents. After all, his outstanding successes in Advent included a 3:2 win over Slovenian Europe Top 16 Cup winner Darko Jorgic in Ochsenhausen's 3:1 victory over Champions League winners 1. FC Saarbrücken TT. In his half-dozen matches in the last month of the year, Togami was only beaten by the Swedish former doubles world champion Karlsson in the 3-2 home win against promoted Bad Homburg.
The club from Upper Swabia must have expected little less from the Asian's re-signing last summer than Togami's clearly positive half-time record. The confidence in the right-hander, who returned to Nippon for the 2023 pre-Olympic season, was certainly high: “I'm confident,” said TTF President Kristijan Pejinovic when Togami's new commitment to the Riss was announced, “that he will make an impact and give our sporting direction the necessary impetus.”
The hopes for positive effects from the one-year “home leave” were certainly justified. In 2022/23, his debut season in a TTF jersey, the anime fan was still just a supplementary player, albeit one with a decent 6:2 season result. As number 52 in the world rankings, Togami then left for Asia, but the former Junior World Championship bronze medallist returned to the team of his former sponsor Bogdan Pugna as a top 25 ace with intermittent appearances in the top 15 and fourth place at the Paris Olympics.
Japan's two-time champions immediately fulfilled the inevitably higher expectations compared to their first year in the Bundesliga. Ochsenhausen's good prospects of a play-off place ahead of the second half of the season are due first and foremost to its most successful player in the first half of the season.
Florian Manzke