Career of William Henzell

Peter Habich Asked 12 years ago

Hi,

Although I am living in Germany I am more interested in the achievement and development of William Henzell as I do for Timo Boll. I also registered to his ttedge website and I think PingSkills and ttedge fit together very well. What I did not find on your site I find on Henzell's and vice versa. I hope you unite one day.

Here my question: How do you estimate Henzell's future career. Could you say anything about his weak and strong sites. Where should he work on?

Regards

 Peter

Jeff Plumb Answered 12 years ago

Hi Peter,

It's great to see you having a keen intereest in Australian players. William Henzell is possibly the best player Australia has ever had. The interesting thing about William is that most of his development and improvement has come from living overseas where table tennis is much more popular.

Even before the recent Olympics where he performed so well, he moved overseas for a period of time to fine tun his game.

Now William is living back in Australia, I think it will be very difficult for him to keep on improving his game from the extremely high level he has achieved. He's also no longer the youngest player either.

Henzell's strongest asset is his backhand. He takes the ball early and really takes control of the rally through his backhand topspin.

As he has spent a lot of the last 5 years back in Australia, I think his weakest point is lack of really intense competition. He's had some really strong results but also had some really close matches against the best players in the World where he just could not get over the line. Take his match against Samsonov at the London Olympics for example. To take Samsonov to a 7th game is incredible and he also led early on in that deciding set. This shows he has the game to mix it with the best in the World. There are other examples too where he has shown how good he is such as against Wang Li Qin at the Beijing Olympics. Perhaps if he'd had more intense competitions throughout that period (by living in Europe rather than Australia) he could have taken the next step? Who knows?

What I do know is that he's been the hardest working player from Australia for a long time and deserves all of his success.