I didn't play today so I will discuss what happened yesterday. I taught the last of 4 classes for beginners. At the same time, there was a college TT event at my club. It was hard teaching with the noise and the limited tables but I did my best. There were also some good matches, most of them involving a student who came back into town from college with his school. He got some extra hike crowd support from clubmates.
After class was over I tried to work on my serve. It is amazing how I kept imagining myself doing one thing while my mind kept doing a completely different thing, which looked like what I always did. Changing technique and habits can be painful so try to be on the right path as early as possible.
I was trying to avoid playing because I had the week off. The night before, which I described, a 1600 player asked me to hit and I tested out some strokes and we played two "one player serves all the time" matches. I won when he served 3-0 but went down when I served 0-2 before coming back to win in 5. I keep forgetting that as tricky as my serves can be, it's hard to deceive someone if you repeat the same serve to them all the time.
On Saturday though, I was also concerned with fixing my forehand technique. A lot of people have commented on my forehand recovery as one of the big issues that I have to fix if I want to become more effective. Even with my limited mobility, some people think I can still break 2200 if I fix that one problem. My elbow and shoulder still piss me off as well as my knees so I don't think about such goals as much anymore but I have been giving the topic some thought.
A Larry Hodges blog post discussed a student of his with a similar but slightly different problem. Larry got the student to play forehand fades as his main looping stroke as the solution so that the student would stop bringing his follow through habitually across his body. I think that this might very well be the solution to my issue as well. I am now committed to making the Wang Liqin style fade my basic forehand topspin so that I stop finishing across my body. Over time, I will modify it of course. Early results were promising but I will now firmly commit.
I then hit with a newcomer of sorts to the club. While hitting with him, I tried some strokes out but then while I am not sure who was to blame, the hitting started to deteriorate. Part of the problem with my game is that I coach too much. Since I coach, I give people the ball where they like it too often. And people then tee off on the ball and I am not good enough to always control it. Moreover, the part of my game where my level really shows vs u1500 players is my serve game, where I can win many points just off serves.
So I got mildly annoyed at the way he was teeing off on the ball and knew that escalating the shots would not help as I am too used to feeding people balls to hit. So I decided to play him in a match. After we played, he didn't ask for a rematch so I felt satisfied I had done my job. For a good portion of the match, he couldn't push my backspin serve properly.
Then a 2100 player asked for matches and I didn't feel ready to play someone at that level but went along for the ride. The thing with this guy is that he had tremendous power and movement so you have to attack first or set him up carefully. He also has good serves and tricky sidespin pushes. I lost the first match but won the next two. He then tweaked something and hard to retire. He was rusty but the good thing was that my fade backhand counter block held up under his looping pressure far better than in recent memory.
Today, I was going to continue to work on the fade but instead, spent a lot of time watching the Euros. As much as I like Lebesson, I find his serve an insult to the rules of table tennis and an illustration of how bad the service rules and their enforcement are. That said, I find my fascination with his forehand grew as he had clearly the best forehand in the tournament. I also fell in love with Dyjas backhand and hope he will get a chance to play the Chinese more often very soon. He is only 21 so there is hope for Europe as I don't think anyone other than Fan Zhendong is rivaling that backhand power.
The last thing is that I made a modification to my grip again. It seemed very minor but I think it made my grip easier to nail down and will help a lot for the month. I have a club tournament this weekend for as well as the Teams tournament in a month during Thanksgiving. I am treating that as my last major event so I will put in some effort to do well, health permitting. One month may be too short but let's see how well the fade fix goes. My serves are good so it really is about return and rally.
