zeio, shall I send these images to the umpires and the ITTF rule committee instead?
This is what every serve by Liang Jingkun looked like today. Before people accuse me of favoritism: it is also how every serve by Ma Long looked like. Before people say "so what's your problem then? These are all faults by the letter of the law" I answer: so is 90% of serves from 95% of the players. The cleanest pendulum I can think of is that of Vladimir Samsonov, no shenanigans whatsoever. However, by the letter of the law, his pendulums are faults. Even though the opponent can clearly see the ball at all times, the ball is obscured as viewed from the right net clamp. And, as zeio cites, that renders the serve illegal according to the currently used rules.
My questions are then:
- what good are the rules that make a completely innocent serve, that is fully visible to the receiver, an illegal one?
- what good are the rules, when within a single match or across several matches there is no consistency whatsoever?
Continuing on, note that there is two possible ways to make the calls consistent:
- don't ever fault these serves, aka the sensible approach;
- fault every one of them, which would include every pendulum in the match between Liang Jingkun and Ma Long (I posted two screenshots but they're in no way unique, I couls post a screenshot for every serve), every pendulum by most of the players (seriously, go watch them on youtube and try to find a clean one), every shovel serve, every reverse pendulum, even some tomahawks.
As Ma Long said in his interview yesterday, he was never before faulted on his pendulum. That's because the first approach was always taken.
If you still don't believe me when I say every pendulum serve by most of the players is technically illegal, here's a couple serves from Hugo and Fan (can you guess how many faults were called?):