I was watching the womens' finals of the Czech Open:
Mima-chan seems to have upped her game quite a bit, and I noticed a few things.
1) She tends to push (on the backhand) with the tip of the racket pointed towards the opponent. I wonder if this is a pips thing, or perhaps it's because she's short and needs the added reach. Seems to work very well.
2) The commentator called the new "inside out banana" a "strawberry" (8:06). I've seen Mima-chan use these before, as early as last year at the World Teams, but didn't really see what she was doing that well. The shot is a backhand one but takes place more to the forehand side, the followthrough goes high and to the right. You see Miu-chan use it quite a bit, too (which is why the sudden attention), and apparently the Chinese men are learning to use it:
However, EmRatThich calls it the boomerang rather than continue with the fruit theme..
There's something else called a "ballroom" (I think it's done by one of the Japanese men - Niwa-san, perhaps) but I forget exactly what it is.3) She's also got what seems to be a right-to-left sidespin block return (3:56, first video, again at 9:33 from behind). It seems to be some variant of the banana. Maybe they'll start calling this the "peach" or the "apple". I'd laugh real hard if it came to be known as the "durian".
More stuff to try out...
Iskandar
