Chongqing Champions: Gear and Technique Points, Part 2
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The forehand short is still most players’ pain point. Receiving a short ball served to the middle-toward-forehand requires moving first. And it is not standalone. Now serves to the forehand short come paired with fast backhand long balls, to restrain attention. At the same time, this middle-toward-forehand short position itself requires the player to decide: receive with backhand or forehand, flick, short-touch, long-chop, or push-flick? It is hard to handle by simple intuition, plus you must judge the spin direction. Besides, the new generation of stars mostly have good backhands, but forehand flicks and such are not so mature. Even Tomokazu Harimoto only became fairly able to flick these two years, and currently can only flick cross-court. For many amateurs, this position does not become a big problem because “their whole body is a problem.” Also, high-tack Hurricane-type rubber is not falsely springy in small-ball control, with high controllability; if you cannot catch the short-touch’s good timing, you can rely on the surface tackiness to control a bit, not easily causing disaster. Only at amateur-expert level does this place start to become a “battleground.” At the professional level, emphasizing no obvious holes is very important. Led by Hugo, a host of players use slightly-tacky rubber to improve the forehand short. High-spring tensors relatively easily pop up.
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Standing at the middle to serve, or backhand serve. This event, the former’s representatives include Sora Matsushima and Tomokazu Harimoto; the latter’s, Felix. First, different serve positions give the opponent different rhythm and line feels, needing adjustment. Also, these two serves’ most direct feel: you can serve shorter, less likely to go off the table. When you serve at the pivot position and easily go off-table to be attacked, try these two. Of course, serving at the middle and with the backhand also help backhand-dominant players launch attacks and appropriately cover the big forehand gap.
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Attacking the opponent’s body. In an era of widespread backhand dominance, attacking this position is more effective. But these two years, on this basis, it evolved further: middle-toward-backhand or middle-toward-forehand — the player must decide on the fly in rallies.
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Speed-up is the most important main theme. Everyone has seen this. Adding spin can be effective too, but spin variation must exceed the opponent’s expected range — harder to execute than natural speed-up. I have to say the ZYRE-03 rubber is interesting. Though not the spin-100 Butterfly officials claim (you could even say its spin is not rich), it really achieves smooth speed-up while being very ball-holding, letting many players ramp up speed plainly and with fewer worries. We see in blade development: outer blades, never mind, are relatively easy to ramp up speed; inner blades are ramping up speed too: the Tibhar Felix is not known for bottom power but has decent close-table first speed; Moregard’s Cybershape 6 is known for sudden acceleration; the W968 evolved into the better-quick-exchange S968. Even my Heima-tuned KLC, by thickening the power ply, greatly raised the blade’s explosiveness and backhand ball-release speed.