Apparently I’ll have to continue to wear my hat and constantly express dissatisfaction with the game and Tomokazu’s loud screams....
Uda did fine this time though, but Togami handed Xiang/Yuan the win. Forehand counter was unstable, his backhand was all over the place but he didn't even bother to pivot to improve the situation
man Wang is a great player....maybe the best in the world right now at this moment, but i really cant stand how freakishly long he keeps his fingernails LOL. Makes me never want to cheer for him.
In TT quality is related to how certain you are of the incoming shot (spin, placement, speed). Harimoto is forced to play safer otherwise he wouldn't even get any shots on the table. WCQ was serving insane this whole match - those hook serves were deadly af and almost downright unreadable. Harimoto struggled with the receive all match long while WCQ was reading his serves like a book. Can't win a match like that.
Nice. What's so special about hook serve? Isn't it just sidespin?
No way it's so simple. It can go from extreme sideunderspin and sidetopspin to no spin to even pure topspin or pure backspin to reverse direction sidespin, not to mention all the direction changes. It all depends how the ball is being brushed. And at the higher levels its all being controlled by tiny wrist and finger movements plus a single or double fake movements. You can watch a few of Craig Bryant's videos on it to get a feel of how insane it can be. There was a guy on Fang Bo's stream (Sun Ting) who had such baffling hook serves that he forced Ma Lin to change to long pips on the RPB side back then. Even Fang Bo (former WTTC silver medalist) couldn't control the serve properly.
The hook can be very hard to read. Fang Bo had a hook serve master come teach his service on his show, and he said when he went to the CNT to demonstrate his service, LGL gave it a try receiving it and he failed 10 service receives in a row.
That guy (Sun Ting) has some insanely fast racket movement like a cat - I pretty much only understood the serve in slowmo haha. The really annoying thing is that he is intentionally not showing his secrets on the Fang Bo channel, saying some crap like hit the ball on top of racket for topspin and bottom of racket for backspin - if you look at the slowmos that ain't how he is disguising it - it's all in the wrist and finger movements. Also reports are that he actually taught WCQ quite a lot of his serve secrets (which we will never know).
