Out of this world backhand by Stephane Ouaiche!

Love how the camera is shaking from Stephanes team celebrating!

Takkyu_wa_inochi said:

its difficult to tell the amount of spin on Freitas last ball, its difficult to judge that for any ball on TV especially with only one angle, but based on my feeling only, we see Ouaiche chopping hard the ball before, and it looks like Freitas, at the end of this long rally is playing his last ball rather conservatively. After pushing a long ball from a chop, its frequent that the ball pops up a little and becomes no or little spin

I think thats what happened and Freitas perhaps did not expect Ouaiche to come back from far back to hit such a ball. Yes Ouaiche is hitting the ball with some spin, but its more a flat hit than a topspin to me on that last ball

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Freitas lightly touches the chop and it jumps off his racket going back. The chop had to have a decent amount of spin for that to happen. Freitas just gave the spin back. He just touched the ball and it jumps back. It as not high. But it is long. One of the things heavy, heavy backspin does for a good server is, it prevents the opponent from dropping the ball short because of exactly what happened from the spin off Freitas's light touch.

Look at the angle of the racket on Ouaiche's backswing. Not an angle for a flat hit. Look how fast the ball is going and look how right near the end of the table the ball arcs down sharply or it would have gone long. Look at the kick on the ball on the bounce, how much the ball accelerates on the bounce, and how it kicks low and straight forward, not up. Look at how fast it arcs down towards the floor after the acceleration of the bounce. Look at how much it kicks on the bounce on the floor. That bounce arcs and it bounces second time on the floor just before hitting the barricade. The ball sticks to the barricade and does not roll away from the barricade in spite of hitting it with some force. And as the camera is about to cut off, it starts rolling towards the left while still against the barricade. That could not happen with a flat hit. If it was a flat hit it would have kept flying and probably reached the barricade without a bounce. If it did bounce, with that kind of speed it would not have bounced twice. And when it hit the barricade with some impact, it would have rolled away from the barricade.

Sorry, no disrespect intended, but I am not so sure you are looking at this closely. Our eyes can fool us just like when a tricky player serves and we misread the spin. But if you watch the ball closely it reacts like it has a lot of spin on it. Not like a Pnachtwey loop.

yes you are right. its not a flat hit but our little debate is of little meaning, actually pro players almost never flat hit a ball. what matters is that he hits the ball as hard as he could on this shot and there is lot of horizontal speed. the axis of his move is his shoulder, he uses his full arm.

yes i should have looked better, we don't see well the angle of his racket at impact but at finish its closed so he must have hit the ball at the top of the bounce with a rather closed angle.

I think as amateur players we wouldn't think of Freitas ball as particularly high, but i think for a pro player it is and thats why Ouaiche went for this ball so agressively I believe.

It is also interesting how he can fully turn towards the BH and take the ball with his feet turned fully. If that ball was coming back, that would mess him up for the next shot. But with that stance he was really able to turn into the ball. Much more power from the hips and legs than you can get with a traditional TT BH stance.

Kind of like a slimjimmi BH. Hahaha.


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