Harimoto would be just as good with celluloid.
He'd be just as good in an absolute sense. But maybe his competition would be better if they hadn't had to switch mid-career to a new ball.
Harimoto would be just as good with celluloid.
People don't fully want to accept that what Harimoto is doing is a work of genius. The kid has supernatural spin reading abilities and timing and probably has far above average in game reactions to reading opponents and the ball even for top level players. He is taking balls that others would step back to take off the bounce and no one else is doing it half as well as he is. He is reading the trajectories perfectly.
If it was as easy as he makes it seem, everyone else would be doing it. Miu Hirano managed to do it extremely well in one tournament and beat the Chinese and hasn't had the same success since then which if some of us remember, Liu Guoliang said she probably doesn't really know what she had discovered. I think Harimoto just plays that way but because he hadn't beaten the universe then, people didn't want to give him credit.
Some people complain that when Harimoto is backed off the table or out of position on the forehand side, he flat hits the ball to bail out. While he is working on that, what you need to do to see how important what he is doing is and how much talent it takes is to see whether anyone else is doing it even semi successfully. Ma Long bails out with a high arcing loop. Many players just sidespin the ball back and hope for the best. Harimoto is taking a low risk shot and doing as well as many top players in that situation. And he is learning to counterloop too, as his forehand has been his biggest area of progress ever since joining the Japanese National Teams.
When Zhang Jike lost badly to Harimoto people said Jike was washed up. But everyone watching the match live saw that Harimoto was too fast for Jike. And Jike diagnosed the match afterwards pretty honestly. He said he had no game plan per se and that he was too slow to keep up with that speed and the result was normal. But that because it was a loss, people would just say all the bad things. Now he almost won, people are saying the right things, but really, treating TT as anything other than a process is a waste of time.
The thing with Harimoto's game is whether he will have the power to finish the point if opponents try to feed him weaker balls so he can't borrow their energy as much. And everything so far points to yes, he will. He has point finishing power and uses angles extremely well. I think people will need to find his elbow better close to the table but since he likes to find angles early it will be really hard to do that.
Harimoto takes balls down the line that I have never seen anyone take before. In fact, you could see that in the rematch, Jike was ready to go down the line first which he wasn't ready to do in their first match. But Harimoto can go down the line off the bounce.
Let's see if anyone other country or player can do what Harimoto is doing. I am not convinced that it is as easy as some people are making it out to be. The closest comparison I can think of is Lin Gaoyuan. But he is not the best player on CNT.
People leap to grand conclusions from limited data and one or two matches. ITTF has been using 40+ balls since 2014. ABS versions are if anything closer to celluloid. What always happens is new great players emerge. Harimoto would be just as good with celluloid.
Some people here struggle because they didnt switch to 40+ when they first came out. Pro players did.
while it is true that the bounce of ABS is more similar to celluloid, the spin is even less, CA was closer in that aspect.
He'd be just as good in an absolute sense. But maybe his competition would be better if they hadn't had to switch mid-career to a new ball.
I completely disagree on this point.
When Zhang Jike lost badly to Harimoto people said Jike was washed up. But everyone watching the match live saw that Harimoto was too fast for Jike. And Jike diagnosed the match afterwards pretty honestly. He said he had no game plan per se and that he was too slow to keep up with that speed and the result was normal.
The lack of forehand to forehand rallies in man's singles semifinals and final of Japan open is a worrying trend.[...]To me, this is a worrying trend. I hope the highest level of table tennis on both men's and women's sides are not played predominantly on backhand. To me, that would be kind of boring.
Everyday is a mid-career day for a lot of players.
There are a lot of players of any age out there, but would such threads exist if there was no Harimoto?
Is he the only one to reveal a revolutionery change of styles due to ball change?
I would argue that Harimoto is a prodigy, not a genius. A Genius is someone who brings something new to the table, which in my view Harimoto has not done yet.
We should debate whether we can all get by with pushing the serve mostly and mostly winning, mostly.
With the slower ball Harimoto kept catching ML's switching point. How many people have caught ML's switching that many times in one match? I can't think of anyone.
I was amazed by Mima Ito more than Harimoto. I haven't watched her before (I know, shame) but some of her creativity was very impressive. The quality of her alternative shots "banana split", "strawberry" were so good that they fooled her opponent regularly. She played her game, not the Chinese game. Meaning when I look at the top, non-Chinese men, they all play 2 wing looping, attack with top spin first with very little creativity. Ito had me saying "wow". Her serve, which you could say is non-Chinese (I don't see many Chinese doing punch serve) was very effective too. I'm a fan of hers now. This type of play - thinking outside the box - is what it takes to beat the best imho.
I'm surprised anyone would doubt that a major equipment change opens a window for younger players to move up the ranks faster than they otherwise would have. Didn't someone once observe that chaos is a ladder? It takes nothing away from Harimoto's amazing results which under any circumstances would mark him as a once in a generation talent.
Interesting. How do you see the main differences between those balls?
i feel that CA does not bounce up like celluloid and ABS and that they break easily. I find their spin pretty good though. With ABS I fell that spin is a lot less and that’s not only my view but actually pretty much anyone I know and the articles I read.
I can’t play with CA because they have such a low bounce that I miss many many shots, never got used to it.