Good drop shot

jrscatman wrote: NextLevel wrote: LUCKYLOOP wrote: NextLevel wrote: Nah - he was clearly trying to drop the ball short. His degree of success may or may not be luck but the intention to play short once his opponent had gone back is evident. Big ? - out of 100 practice attempts - how many times do you think he could drop that ball that short ???????????????????? People do it all the time off lobs and this ball was pretty slow.  Doing it off service return was the novel element.  But Zaman Molla does something similiar but less spectacular against the same opponent with a push vs. incoming push.  See the early point here at 42 seconds in - the scorekeeper thought it was a let. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IeCe9xQFl8 Yes, this was drop shot - but you can't compare this drop to the one from the OP. The original drop was off an extremely spinny top spin return. I would say dropping it that short is extremely lucky or extremely good.

How do you know the ball was "extremely spinny"?   One of the issues with spin is that you can't tell when a ball was mistimed or not.

It would be interesting to see other points in the match to see whether Xiang played a pattern that encouraged this.  Part of the reason I'm showing the Zaman video is that Xiang gets caught by a similar play and he might be notorious for backing up early.

NextLevel wrote: Tinykin wrote: OK, I get it. The score doesn't move so it was a net call, right? I don't see anything for a 'let' call, but I may have missed something. There was no ump... Just a scorekeeper. The scorekeeper simply records the score and the players ump themselves. He didn't record that point until he was told to by the players. That is why I said he thought it was a let. To be fair, the point looked weird to me until I did a triple take to appreciate Zaman's touch.

F***ing h**ll!! Is this how you guys operate? I understand it now. That is a true scorekeeper.