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The picture is not quite as dire as you paint out. The thing is that he already has a 50-50 chance of not being seeded into a Chinese quarter though of course with his luck he will be seeded into one (and in the past, he flunked out when he wasn't anyways). He only guarantees not being in one...

I like your conceptual game, I think OFF- blade *AND* hybrid rubbers is a bit much (slow) for someone as young as you, I would prefer solid OFF blade with Hybrid, or OFF- blade with fast, spinny rubbers. For the backhand stroke itself, the first thing that enabled me to swing better was to use...

IMHO, that is a lefty vs righty deficit helping WCQ, but again, let's see how it goes. When you play close to the table against power and movement, you will always look slower.

It depends. I think top table tennis is a mental game and I am not sure Lin Yun Ju has a better read of the game than Harimoto. Yes his technical foundation is better in most/many ways, but even then, it isn't entirely clear that this is as important as being able to read the game better. And...

I guess that is the biggest reason why I root for him - he is clearly working insanely hard on making himself better after all this years, no one knows whether it is too late (to be honest Metaxa may be right), but if it is too late for him, it is clearly too late for me lol. And I don't mean...

How much money would you place on Japan winning this matchup you have just shown?

That would hurt ESN and Butterfly business model like speed glue did.

The biggest thing I think would change your game is fast arm swing into the ball to generate a lot or spin. This is best practiced against backspin balls, then against all kinds of balls, so that the swing is adaptable to many balls. It might require a lower stance at the table for maximum...

Nothing is going to cut it in the final, we just watch it and enjoy it for what it is. Harimoto should get SYS, Hayata should get CM and Hirano WYD. The funny thing is that all the "stats" that make Japan look scarier will be used to hype up the match by the English commentators but the result...

Exactly. The same Harimoto some believe will never have a chance of beating WCQ beat the Taipei team that just decimated the German team.

However you feel about his moaning and groaning, Dima is a big match player. But Lin is supposed to win this if he finds his full form.

Huge win. He never beats Dima in big matches so this was huge. Now will Lin do his job? And will Japan regret their victory over Taiwan in the group stages lol?

Wow. If Chuang wins this, the match is over barring a German miracle. Lin is almost unbeatable.

Looks like Taiwan is targeting Franziska and for Lin to take 2.

Maybe because Harimoto has improved enough in 3 to 4 months that Wang didn't obliterate him as badly as he would have prior to this? Let's see how it goes.

Is Groth another player whose star is hard to track? Sometimes he is the second coming of Boll and then sometimes he is the second coming of Maze post injuries.

Harimoto largely needs to defend his middle more aggressively and I suspect that will happen more and more as he develops better footwork. At the age of 20, it is possible to write off a player but I am not sure it is a wise idea in this case, especially when this match could easily have been a...

I suspect this won't age well. Harimoto is amazingly still improving. Wang is at his peak

Definitely not fun if you like to play fast topspin all the time, but I think once you learn to play slow and read the ball and adjust to the patterns, it becomes much easier than playing fast topspin just because it is slow.

Will love to hear the coaching rationale for fielding Ito. @zeio , please do not fail us.