Whew! Luckily I am not aiming to be the top, my knees will thank me so much!
Of course, even though WCQ lost to HUGO in a close match his footwork and forehand are excellent. It’s his rallying skills he needs to work on
I think he needs to work more on his strategy and mentality. Guy is as perfect as one can get as a player. Superb footwork, lethal forehand, slightly less lethal backhand, great rallying (you don't best ML without great rallying skill), and dodgy serves.
Yeah, by improving his rallying I meant the placement of the balls and the expectations of where it’d come back to
I don't know about that either to be honest. Everyone is allowed to lose and learn and sometimes you just have to accept the other guy played well and maybe you can change a few things next time. But his rallying ability is not bad just because he had close matches with Duda and Calderano. Zhang Jike is acting like those annoying uncles that talk about how good they were in their days...
this is a good question.
I feel WCQ's FH is not that good.
If you play table tennis, most of the footwork and athleticism drills are used to setup the forehand (for good reason but every player is different). But one of the reasons Hugo is different (and you can see it in even the final point of the match vs WCQ) is that his backhand strike zone and quality allows him to do footwork drills with the backhand that some only do with the forehand. Hugo can do 3 point backhands easily.
Yeah, he’s slowly turning into Mizutani, though Mizutani actually has the right to yap cause ever since his retirement the JNT Men haven’t really performed as well.
Exactly. Harimoto fits the description as well but the same thing, everyone is working on their game and no one has a weak forehand at that level. Everyone does 3 point forehand drills. And if he is saying Lin Shidong, is he really saying Lin lost to Hugo because he didn't play enough forehands? That is nonsense. Or because Lin is not athletic enough because his system is not forehand oriented.
I thought he said top 5. I figured he was making fun of them all coz they have strong backhand.
He is not on to anything, this is how many players develop. Even Kreanga will tell you that backhand sets up the point, forehand to finish the point. The question is how does that explain the result of this past weekend? Who are the players who do not train forehand? Is Zhang Jike going to pretend he used his forehand more than WCQ? Is he going to pretend that if he had LSD's backhand he wouldn't have played more backhand?
Lefty vs righty, the wide forehand becomes everyone's weakness. Nothing special there. The thing is his style relies a lot on your inability to deal with his high quality low trajectory topspin so it is high risk high reward and not so much high consistency. But a style is a style, it is like saying that Fan's weakness was all out serve and attack.
I don't know ZJ was implying that, what I got from the video is BH dominant players will come short in the footwork department compared to FH dominant players due to their over reliance on BH, he is also comparing the 1%ters, the cream of the crop, those players have solid BH and FHs, He even said in that video that while his BH was good he relied on his FH during difficult times, to be honest I haven't seen the new crop of players cover the table with the legendary footwork Ma Long, Xu Xin, FZD and Zhan Jike had, the new batch do tend to go for more BH shots in rallies instead of pivoting to the stronger FH.
