Sun Yingsha Edges Hayata in Seven Games to Reach Montpellier Semifinals

Sun Yingsha needed every one of her seven games to get past Japan’s Hina Hayata in the quarterfinals of the WTT Champions Montpellier on October 31, winning 4-3 in a match that swung back and forth until the final points. The scores — 11-7, 11-9, 9-11, 11-13, 11-8, 9-11, 11-9 — tell the story of a contest that never settled.

Sun, China’s top-ranked women’s player, opened with two controlled games before Hayata clawed back. The Japanese left-hander took the third and then the fourth in extra points, 13-11, to level the match at two games apiece. Sun responded with 11-8 in the fifth, only for Hayata to force a decider with another 11-9. In the seventh, Sun held her nerve to close it out 11-9.

The result extends one of the most one-sided rivalries in the modern women’s game: it is Sun’s 22nd consecutive win over Hayata. The two have met repeatedly on the WTT circuit and at major championships, and the Japanese player has repeatedly come close without breaking through. This time she was two games from ending the streak.

For global viewers unfamiliar with the WTT, the World Table Tennis series runs a tour of Champions events that bring together the top-ranked players for single-elimination draws, with ranking points and prize money at stake. Montpellier is one of the stops on that calendar, and the quarterfinal stage is where the draw usually narrows to Chinese and Japanese names.

That is exactly what happened here. Sun advances to a semifinal against Wang Yidi, her Chinese teammate, guaranteeing that at least one Chinese player reaches the final. Matches between Chinese teammates are a familiar feature of the later rounds at WTT events, and they tend to be tactical, low-margin affairs because the players know each other’s games intimately.

Hayata’s performance will still draw attention. Pushing the world’s leading player to a seventh game, and doing it by winning two games in extra points, shows the gap at the top of the women’s game is narrow on any given night. The 22-match streak is a striking statistic, but the margins inside it have often been small.

Sun’s path now runs through Wang, and a win there would put her within one match of another WTT Champions title. For Hayata, the takeaway is less about the loss than about how close she came, and whether that translates into a breakthrough the next time the two meet.

Table tennis’s global audience is concentrated in Asia, but the WTT tour has been steadily building a European footprint with events like Montpellier. A seven-game quarterfinal between two of the sport’s best-known names is the kind of match that sells the tour abroad, even when the result follows the familiar script.