Recent content by JHB

Some stellar foul serving from the older guys on the table next to you !!

I certainly don't miss the old-style bats with pimples and no sponge, I always tried to avoid those even in the 1970s and all the bats I have actually bought have been reversed rubber with sponge. Where I play now a lot of the older "social" players prefer doubles to singles and they always...

I played from 1974 until 1981 fairly regularly, and then I changed jobs and lost access to a table tennis facility so I stopped playing. I started again in 2014 and l've played twice a week since then.

Well mine (as shown on the left) is certainly very fast and the blade was not expensive - around 50 GBP. You may however be looking for cheaper rubbers than I am using, so I wil defer to others on the question of rubber choice !

I have only used ZGR. I bought it because according to the vendor's ratings it was the spinniest rubber they had, and not so slow as to be hard work. It's great for my BH serves and I wouldn't be without it. In play it has good touch for short play, while it slows my BH attack (on a fast blade)...

It's called the "expedite" rule. It apparently had to be invoked in our local league once when a match between two lady defenders was threatening to keep everyone there until 1 a.m.

Get the 8.5, it's even more fun !!

Definitely Tees Sport for Butterfly and Bribar for Tibhar (and Joola if you are tempted.) Butterfly generally don't permit their resellers to ship outside their own country. They can't physically prevent it of course but they can refuse to supply that reseller any more products !

He is certainly very good at this, which suggests he has had plenty of practise. I agree with the others above though, however neat the results are there is far too much danger of slicing your own fingers ! The only gain I can see for taking the risk with a razor blade is that there appears to...

This is where the old 21-point scoring system came into its own - "Four more of those please !!"

I agree, but in most of the above footage the ball looks white - it only appears orange when they're knocking up. Possibly an optical illusion due to some technical limitation of the video technology back then ?

Even in 1995, how did Waldner get away with playing in a white shirt ??

No, I said at the start that I don't want to get involved in the pips/anti debate and I was purely telling the story of the two-colour rule. In fact I do not give a flying left-handed @#&^£ about junk rubbers and I am certainly not going to "Pay close attention" anywhere except on the table...

Not wanting to get involved in the pips/anti debate, but if I may hark back to this question ! Players of a certain age may remember a British guy by the name of John Hilton who became European Singles Champion in 1980 "Despite being a relatively unknown amateur player" as Wikipedia puts it...

Being a bit of a lazy old devil, I confess that I don't - I wait until it gets a bit rank and then I bin it and open a new one !