My analyse: Ma Long vs Fan Zhendong 2015

[sebas-aguirre]

Ma Long vs Fan Zhendong Mens World Cup 2015

Fan Zhendong played similar style to female players. All backhand, only play forehand when the ball goes to his forehand.

Also he makes so much use of the backhand flick that it turns against him at some point because ma long already knows what he's going to do.
So he actually looks for his flick, look how Ma Long serves almost with no spin to fzd's forehand, forces him to flick.

FZD should try mixing it with pushes.

or flick to fh like ZJK does.

I don't think technically Ma Long is better than Fan Zhendong, he just engages his fh more which gives him more points. Many times he just serves super long and directly goes to fh loop. Or serve no spin to fh of FZD, then maybe 1 bh and then just step sideways and start looping with fh.

This is similar to Wang Liqin style or even Waldner.

None of these two had a strong backhand.

After all these years and changes the fh dominant players are still the ones who stay on top.

I think still of all the Chinese players the one who can cause more problems to Ma Long is ZJK.

I have good hopes for Liang Jingkun but his style is similar to Fan Zhendong so Ma Long would probably crush him as well.

 

[mcaibyz2]

I think Ma Long has saved his stategy to beat FZD for big events, such as World cup and world championship. FZD is still slightly worse player than Ma Long, Xu Xin, Zhang Jike.

 

[MegaZZ]

I think Ma Long has saved his stategy to beat FZD for big events, such as World cup and world championship. FZD is still slightly worse player than Ma Long, Xu Xin, Zhang Jike.

I think in major tournaments (world cup, world championships, Olympics), FZD still lacks the experience and the ability to adapt compared with his three more experienced colleagues, ML, ZJK and XX. Also as the opening post of this thread correctly pointed out FZD's short game is definitely substantially weaker and both ML and XX have repeatedly exploited this. FZD's BH flicks are much more powerful and spinnier than that of other players, even more so than Ovtcharov who is extremely strong with this technique and yet for ML and XX they repeatedly serve to allow a flick and then simply take FH's against the banana flick. They have worked out where to serve and with what kind of spin which restricts FZD's power flicks to more or less one side of the table and then the FH comes.

Nevertheless the score of 4-0 is more than you would expect, I would reasonably expect many players like XX, Ovtcharov and many others to take at least 4-1 or 4-2 against ML. 4-0 to me means FZD's lack of experience and ability to adapt during a match without a coach on the side needs to vastly improve...that's called experience and simply requires time.

And yes we still await an Olympics finals showdown between ML and ZJK, hopefully when they are both injury free. I like both players very much in their own way, simply want to see a finals shown down at Olympics or World Championships before either of them retires, we deserve to see this showdown!

 

[raazzz]

I wondering what stats they have on practise matches. Would be fun to know.