It's been a particularly quiet table tennis recently. After squeezing in 5 tournament in 6 weeks over the May / June / July period, I've had very little on since mid July. My next big event is the World Singles Cup which is in Belgium in late October. This will be my 6th World Singles Cup. 20 players will compete for US$150,000 in prize money over 3 days. The top 8 players have byes through the initial group stage. I'll have 2 matches in my group and hopefully progress to the next stage.

I've made some changes to my training recently and have tried to target some specific skills. We've been doing fewer standard training exercises (like footwork or open consistency exercises) and are practicing more on set plays.

We've often been starting with warm-up, counterhitting and topspinning and then moving on to topspin against topspin. Our favourite way of doing this is that we are allowed to play over the opponent's entire backhand half and about a fifth of the forehand half. The rally starts with a long flat serve and then it's a free for all. The idea is to outmanouvre the opponent by mixing your placement between the wide backhand and pocket (crossover between backhand and forehand). Being a backhand dominant player, my pocket always needs improvement so this exercise suits me well. We'll then do something similar on the forehand side as well. Often we turn this into games, up to 11 with 2 serves each, so that we try to introduce some element of pressure and wanting to win.

Another favourite at the moment is to do short sidespin and topspin serves, get a flick to the backhand, topspin the ball down the line to the opponent's forehand and then topspin the next shot to the opponent's wide backhand. We'd play a few set like that and then change to flicking to forehand, playing down the line to the backhand and then playing the next ball to the wide forehand. So we're isolating small areas of the game and putting the few training hours available into making these areas work as well as possible.

I did some filming a few weeks ago with a Japanese chopper who has visited Melbourne on and off for the past few years. I've made my first video TE41 Topspin Consistently Against Long Pimples and have about 6 more videos to make going through tactics, spins, power play, angles, dealing with the spin, etc. Long pimples are probably the most infuriating rubber to play against for the majority of players and the area where there is the least amount of quality videos and training.