Hi Tom thanks for that. I do have few points for help regarding match play. Yesterday played at my old club against 3 very different players. I will go through each one and problems and Mayb you can advise.
1. Martin with long pips on Bh.
Have played him few times and yesterday beat him 3-1 after losing first end. Took me a while in first leg to focus on the pips. My Strategy was to give long no spin serve to pips and then attack strongly, or give variou spinny serves to his fh. I think errors occurred occasionally as I played his stroke rather than the spin that comes back so Ocassion sky when he pushed I played open up rather than over and it resulted in going out. The other thing was he at times used his pips to serve short to my fh and it was very short it caught me out and I think reason was I was in normal serve position so was late getting to do a decent receive. My question is if I see he will serve with pips am I safe to just stand closer as I will hardly then get a long serve or be rushed. What caught me out was fact serve was slow and very short and if I was closer to start with I could have received much better?
2. Dave 2 wing looper
Now this guy is someone I use to look upto as very strong player and looper and very experienced. I beat him 3-2 but gave away few weak points which I would put down to technical issue. Firstly serve receive bit me in ass a bit, and specially topspin serves. He mainly serve pendulum short backspin to fh I tried to touch and at times too softly that went into net. I didn’t mind pushing long to his fh as I liked countering but I missed the counter and difficult to say whether it was because he got a wider angle and I was too slow getting into position but I missed a lot of counters after intentionally letting him loop with a view for me to counter. Second problem was I would let him open up on his Bh but I would step back which made blocking off bounce difficult. I naturally just stepped back after pushing long and I think I should have stayed closer to block his open up off bounce and then step back for the top to top rally. I think me stepping back on his open up meant I was contacting his return on the rise so Mayb blocking off bounce with bit of kick would have been much better. 3rd big prob is he identied my serve receive of topspin serves are weak so he started doing tomahawk serve to short middle or slightly fh which gave me major problems.
luckily my tactics out did his as last couple games I did fast long pushes to his middle which didn’t allow him to play a good quality open up and it gave me a chance to get in.
3. Ashley – lobber
here I can safely say I lost 3-0 and 80% down to serve receive. He mainly did topspin side spin pendulum and my receivers were aweful often going off end or too passive. I think I was trying to be too aggressive and when it went long I would occasionally be too passive and push which popped up for smash! Also I think I was taking serves to early and going too hard which I think made serve react more! Games were close but every game I gave 3-4 points away on serve receive which is too many. I didn’t mind him playing away from table as I’m more than comfortable in my open game.
It’s difficult without seeing video of matches but hopefully u may be able to guide on the above buddy.
my serve receives of topspin isn’t great having practiced so much against tighter backspin serves that I’m making unforced errors on topspin ones. And my serve receive on fh is weaker than Bh for sure,
