Marco Borrillo vs. Alex Lai - Table Tennis

Interesting match

two suggestions for Marco :

1. Try some short serves to his fh , after awhile he gets used to returning your serves with the LP, and you lose tour service advantage

2. When he serves medium chop, try flipping, dropping, or pushing to a corner so he has to move to loop. You were lettinh him open too easily

Anticanti

I think Macro made way too many errors vs his black side which i assume is long pips. It seemed like he wasn't able to read the no spin pushes and heavy spin chops many times. A few easy ones he just missed it when he shouldn't too. Also he served way too many long forehands to Alex and Alex would just loop it and he wasn't ready to defend or counter his own serve. I don't know why he would keep serving long to his forehand after so many loops by Alex. From what I saw Alex's forehand form was terrible but atleast he makes his shots in.

I think it would be better to serve more to his black side since he don't attack with it and always seems to return it long back. But I would try serving the same type of spin so the spin comes back about the same or you can figure out the difference depending on what he did to it. Then attack from there since it seemed like everytime he was on the offense your defense couldn't keep up.

I think if Macro played this one slower, he definately had a chance of beating Alex. If you did like 70 percent power on some of your loops, just to get the feel for his spin first it would of helped a lot. On the last game, the points went so fast and Macro seemed like he just gave up.

You make some good points.

One major disagreement is on Alex's forehand loop. He has a classic old-fashioned chinese loop, very similar to Chen Yinghua but on a lower level. It is a circular swing but it produces a great deal of spin and some good speed. He has, I believe, Friendship on the forehand.

I've beaten Alex a few times in tournaments in the past, but he's won the last 2 times I've played him (once in practice, and then here in this touranment). He has changed his long pips to something that he claims is long pips but it plays much more like medium pips.

When he had "true" long pips, I used to serve underspin to his long pips and then attack the return. But with this stuff, if I serve underspin he hits it back or he pushes it back and it comes back dead instead of the slight topspin I was expecting. You are correct, I was fairly confused on how to play this stuff. It kind of feels like you are playing against a hardbat some of the time, but then sometimes it does actually act like long pips.

I suspsect it acts like long pips against fast balls and short pips against soft and slow balls. Some types of long pips act like that. I need to practice against that stuff more.

www.marco-borrillo.com

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My 2 cents. From the way the ball reacts off his bh, Alex's bh sure looks like LP. Have also seen an earlier clip of his and his strokes has not varied much. IMHO his bh returns are fairly predictable and his chops and blocks are a little high and inconsistent. If you loop a few before going for the big one, that may help. I don't think you will necessarily lose out to him if you "rally' with him and stretch the game out. I agree that his fh is his scoring wing, but it is also prone to making mistakes. His fh block also does not seemed very orthodox or consistent. I think if you loop to his fh you will also tend to win more points than lose them.

Agreed. In general I should have slowed down, like you said, and done some high spins. My tactics are way off against him lately.

Marco

www.marco-borrillo.com

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