Matthew Syed

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im also trying to find out-he may have used a grubba pro ?

Matthew SyedBty Grubba Pro Bty Long Feint 0.5


not sure what version of the pro as it was an all blade and then changed to all-
ive only ever seen 2 versions of the pro-i have 2 versions of the all-
plays similar to the defplay
 
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Against KLH in his prime he would still stand no chance. KLH is one of the alltime greats and possibly the smoothest player ever. Matthew Syed was mostly around 50 in the world most of his career (made it to 25 one year) and these newer balls don't make life easier for defenders. KLH without speed glue is ZJK.

Matthew Syed is a really interesting guy. I liked his book (he has a newer one now) and some of his articles in the Times are especially good.
 
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says Aging is a killer
He would be a WR top 100 player

I wonder how Matthew Syed would do in this current era of tt without speed glue tinykin?

Adding to Baal's appraisal,
Syed was an old style retriever defender. He manipulated the spin on the 38mm ball to both fool the attacker or wear him down. His attack was mainly pick hits when he caused his opponent to pop up the ball. At his best he would have been in the same class as Gionis or Filus (not as good as Joo or Matsudaira) so he would probably still be top WR top100 with occasional forays into the top 50.
One thing is that any club team would love to have him today. Apparently his ability to read an opponent was uncanny so having him in your corner was always worth a few points.
 
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He lost to Jimmy Butler one year (they are the same age). Jimmy told me a funny story about that. I think it may have happened at the US Open, I'm not sure.

Apparently Syed didn't know anything about Jimmy before the match except for recognizing his name. He knew he might have to play him in the next round, and so watched him play for a couple of minutes and saw him hit a few massive forehands. (That has never been a Jimmy Butler strength, since he was a kid really, it was really barely adequate, his mechanics were all wrong). All in all Syed wasn't to worried, but decided to play it safe and play a lot of balls to Jimmy's backhand! (He told this to Jimmy after the match, and Jimmy told this to me a few years ago, and also said that he wouldn't be able to beat Syed very often).

(To people who don't see why this if funny, the last thing you would ever want to do is to keep playing balls to Jimmy's backhand, especially back then, since Jimmy was in the top 100 for a reason).
 
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Kong show a great example of the importance of opening the racket against heavy downspin.
 
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