Constructing a point for defense

Duncan Wraight Asked 12 years ago

Hi both,

Thanks for posting your recent defensive training plan. Much appreciated.

I had a bit of an eye-opening experience in training tonight. I played against a lad I don't know particularly well, other than to know that he plays two divisions above me, and asked him if he'd be OK with me practicing my chopping. He agreed and we had a good knock for around 20 minutes, with my chopping steadily improving on both sides to the point where he was making more errors than I was.

We then played a match. All of the games were quite close, but it was mostly because of my serves - I was clearly outclassed in general play.

That's absolutely fine, but the main thing that came up for me was how I stop him from ripping through my pushes.

This can be broken down in to two questions:

• Is the idea that, if I'm trying to construct a "defensive" point so I can wheel out my chop, I put varying amounts of backspin on my pushes to make my opponent read that and hopefully either hit a high one (to attack), in to the net or be forced to lift/loop it over the net with less pace than a drive?
• Should I be using my LPs to receive, or the inverted?

I'm not sure I'm getting anywhere near enough backspin on my pushes to stop him from doing this at the moment. Is there a knack? Or am I simply approaching the construction wrong?

Let's take attacks out of the equation - apart from missing a few simple forehands my third ball attacks worked out well.

Thanks in advance,

Jeff Plumb Answered 12 years ago

Hi Duncan,

That's great that you were able to hold your own. Serving is a really important part of table tennis so it's good to see you gaining an advantage there.

As a defensive player you do want to get your chop working for you. This means you need to stop your opponent making a strong attack while you are still close to the table. You can stop this by attacking as a lot of modern defenders do. Or you need to place the ball well and/or use a lot of backspin. If you are returning with long pimples then it's hard to generate your own spin but you can reverse your opponents spin. So if they serve with a lot of spin, you can use the pimples effectively. If they serve with no spin you can't really generate your own spin so you need to place the ball the best you can. You can also twiddle and then get plenty of backspin with a push.

The other thing to consider is how quickly you can get back from the table and into a good position to return their topspin. Perhaps you can take the push a little later and further back, place it deep and then you are already further back from the table. You can then move back quickly and into position to return their loop.

It sounds like you've got the strategy working pretty well and just need to fine tune the execution. Keep up the good work.

Let me know if these ideas help you out.