Timo Boll struggling with new plastic ball?

I was closely watching all matches on WC2014, and you are right, most players were not "struggling".
But there were excessive ammount of situations when players were like surprised with rebound of heavy-spinned balls. Completely missed topspins, crucial serve errors and receive errors.
In my personal opinion, there is large effect of new poly ball on players.
Effect is more noticeable in situation when actions of players are based on automatics (serves) and reflexes(powerfull topspins, smashes etc).
Also, I am afraid that this effect can be amplified by differences between balls of different batches and different vendors.
And for sure, there is psychological effect of new ball. Players will be saying that problem is strange rebound and effect of ball but not their reflexes and technique.

So it will take a year or few years to alleviate this effect via improving quality of balls, training for new balls, and work out reflexes for new ball.
 
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I was closely watching all matches on WC2014, and you are right, most players were not "struggling".
But there were excessive ammount of situations when players were like surprised with rebound of heavy-spinned balls. Completely missed topspins, crucial serve errors and receive errors.
In my personal opinion, there is large effect of new poly ball on players.
Effect is more noticeable in situation when actions of players are based on automatics (serves) and reflexes(powerfull topspins, smashes etc).
Also, I am afraid that this effect can be amplified by differences between balls of different batches and different vendors.
And for sure, there is psychological effect of new ball. Players will be saying that problem is strange rebound and effect of ball but not their reflexes and technique.

So it will take a year or few years to alleviate this effect via improving quality of balls, training for new balls, and work out reflexes for new ball.

Totally agree with everything in your post. The plastic ball is the same for everyone, some players will find some shots easy to execute and some difficult. The same thing goes for the celluloid. Im not saying that the playing level is the same just that as time passes and players train more often they will adapt. The effect of the new ball is not as huge as the ban of speed glue.

Timo played a great game against ZJK and I frankly I didnt see any kind of "struggle" with the new ball
 
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I think it's possible that a lot of players WERE struggling with the plastic ball but maybe most are fully adjusted now.
 
It seems it is Dima who is struggling with the new ball. His style especially BH needs perfect timing and any slight deviation of bounce cause him trouble.

Dima started to play with plastic ball in chinese superleague. And he had zero problems with his technique, and showed very good play against top-level chinese players.
But if you take a look on changes of Dima's performance over time, you will notice that he is extremely unstable, no difference poly-ball or celluloid. For example he always loosing in first round of ITTF WorldTour Finals. He very often loosing to more stable players (last example - Timo Boll, Niagol Stoyanov).
So I think new ball have not much effect on Dima's performance, it is his physics and mental form.
 
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