The following observations are of course my personal view and do not claim to be the “truth”!
Here comes KANG_Dongsoo (South Korea):
In this game one thing that Kang did, put him into trouble: He did “stop push” the ball on Muramatsus defence often putting the ball too long or too high. He should practice faking to topspin again and then stop push a ball with the long pimples that bounces at least twice on the table. This is a doable excercise rarely used by defenders!
Strengths:
- very good footwork
- very consistent and very choppy backhand defence
- very good and very consistent forehand topspin against pushes
- good and also choppy forehand defence
- very good backhand serves
Weaknesses:
- return on serve occasionally bounces back too high or too short making it easy for the opponent to punish him with fast topspins
- variety of forehand serves has room for improvement
- sometimes forehand chop on heavily “loaded” topspins return too high.
- I have not seen him blocking or smashing with his backhand so far neither with the pimples out or pimples in-side.
Suggestions:
- Improve forehand serves. Get serves to bounce shorter, if not intended to go long and fast
- should consider taking the long pips on the forehand when defending on very spinny but slow topspins.
- Occasionally use backhand block down the line as a variation to defending by chop.
- Occasionally use backhand topspin as a variation just to break up the game
- Generally I see a huge potential for this player to continually climb the ITTF ranking up to the top 50 players.
tabletennisdefenders 