Table Tennis: more important in Football than you might
think...
Cristiano Ronaldo's free-kick technique has been revealed: he is so obsessed
with learning to put effect on the ball that he even practises it playing table-tennis.
Leonel Pontes, his youth coach at Sporting Lisbon, claims "There was no
beating him at table tennis, even when he was 13 or 14. He was the same at football. He was able to say that if you touch
the ball in a certain way, it would gain that direction."
Source: Telegraph.co.uk
Arsenal's Robin van Persie has also tried his hand at Table Tennis. The Arsenal matchday programme
arranged for Robin to spend an afternoon at Southall Sports Centre, home of leading British side London Progress, for an afternoon
of coaching and competition with three-times Commonwealth champion Matthew Syed and 18-year-old prodigy Darius Knight.
Robin was put through his paces with a range of serving and returning drills before finishing with
with two sets against Knight, the Under-21 national champion. Urging his opponent to operate at full throttle, Van Persie
managed respectable defeats of 3-11 and 4-11, hitting clean winners for several of his points.
Source: Arsenal.com
