male, Professional high level defenders

Game and skills analysis Gionis Panagiotis (Greece)

3 Comments

The following observations are of course my personal view and do not claim to be the “truth”!

Here comes Gionis Panagiotis (Greece) who is one of the rare players maintaining an own homepage 

Strengths:

  • Good footwork
  • Great Forehand topspin against block and counter topspin
  • Good consistent defending on the backhand
  • Good use of pimples when taking short serves
  • Good use of pimples when taking long serves playing them back with a lot of speed into a great variety of angles
  • Good occasional use of backhand topspin with pimples in
  • Good backhand serves

Weaknesses:

  • Forehand topspin against defenders is too weak
  • Occasionally returns the ball too high with pimples against heavy but short and slow topspins
  • Nearly not defending at all with the forehand
  • Always uses the pimples on the backhand when returning serves
  • Not using the pimples often enough to counter attack on slow blocks or topspins
  • The variety of forehand serves could improve (I see improvements here since I first wrote this!)
  • Always uses the pimples on the backhand when returning pushes within a rally (I see improvements here since I first wrote this!)

Suggestions:

  • Practice spinning the ball up heavily against heavy backspin
  • Gionis should consider trying out pimples that produce more backspin like TSP Curl P-1 R or similar
  • Should consider occassionally defending with the forehand either with the pimples on short, spinny and slow forehand topspins or with floats on all kinds of topspins into his forehand
  • Should pratice also using the pips in when returning serves with heavy backspin
  • Should pratice to block and smash with the pimples
  • Try to extend the variety of forehand serves
  • Should consider occasionally using the pimples in to return a push ball into his backhand in order to prevent the opponent from getting in again with a hard, speedy forehand topspin.

3 thoughts on “Game and skills analysis Gionis Panagiotis (Greece)”

  3. I agree with you about Gionis’s backhand pimples, but the problem is that he clearly wants to keep a strong forehand attack so he’s using a butterfly Korbel OFF blade (like he said in a recent interview) that would be very uncontrollable in defence with something different from Feint Long II. He compensates the lack of some backspin with the low height and the speed of his chops. That is probably also the cause because of which he doesn’t chop with the forehand: the fast blade and rubber on the forehand (probably Tenergy 64 MAX) make it almost impossible.
    Besides, his backand defence is really amazing if you consider the materials he uses!

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