Weekly Equipment Watch 245: Xiang Peng's 0-3 Rout, and the Anti-Loop Stars' Setups
At the WTT regular challenge in Taiyuan, an event many experts skip, Xiang Peng lost 0-3 to Luka Mladenovic, out in the first round. The three game scores: 6-11, 5-11, 8-11. In the second game, Xiang Peng was once down 0-9. Is this still the Xiang Peng who was Wen Ruibo’s idol, the defending World Juniors champion who swept Moregard in the final? Yes — same name, same person. Back when DHS signed Xiang Peng (forehand-dominant) and Butterfly signed Lin Shidong (backhand-dominant), both sides should have sighed: we both have a bright future. How did a good hand get played into this?
This Luka who swept Xiang Peng is from the wealthy small country Luxembourg, Ni Xialian’s mixed-doubles teammate, training and competing with Coach Ni from a young age. His best world ranking is only outside 80. Beating Xiang Peng — clearly, his anti-loop rubber deserves much credit. Why are weird rubbers so effective now? Winter, remade via weird rubber, has reached a World Cup women’s singles semifinal, world-ranked 9th. This relates to the plastic ball’s era backdrop. Of course, our national players repeatedly fall to weird rubbers, on one hand because single-ball quality is not as high now; on the other, in-team styles are not as varied as before, so adaptability is naturally worse. Plus the players’ own adjustment ability is average, with rigid thinking, so when the exam question was never practised, they easily fail. Even Tomokazu Harimoto, often joked as cannot do questions he never practised, and prone to upsets, beat Luka 3-2 last time. But this Taiyuan stop, Xiang Peng had no resistance, almost no adaptation.
Luka is forehand inverted ZYRE-03, backhand anti-loop, same model as Winter — both the Dr. Neubauer ABS 3 PRO. His backhand mainly jams and bumps, and he can flip the bat to counterattack with inverted rubber. The forehand looks inverted, but sometimes he flips to the anti-loop side to receive serve. We said before that the women’s team lacks the ability to simplify, so playing weird rubber is hard. Xiang Peng is about the same. He could have played simply: either serve a fast long ball to Luka’s backhand — he can hardly return high quality with anti-loop, and the inverted attack threat is not big; or serve spin/no-spin to Luka’s middle-toward-forehand short — and rip with any chance. Anti-loop really fears no-spin. Long pips, especially illegal big-pip long pips, fear no-spin even more.
Last time I played a 2000-plus expert, flipping between short pips and long pips. Our retired provincial-team teacher went up first and was knocked out 1-3 in the first match. Of course, later he played him again and easily swept 3-0. When I went up against this bat-flipper, in ability I am surely inferior. But I just serve spin/no-spin well, and chop underspin spinny enough — jokingly called “looping my ball is like a crane” — so the opponent erred a lot. I settled it 3-0 at once. What I want to say: because we lack this experience against weird rubbers, the national team now loses many inexplicable balls. This 0-3 rout, clearly, is a blow to Xiang Peng, just placed on the Worlds team lineup. Taiyuan was a chance to prove himself. Below are the anti-loop stars’ gear setups.