Yesterday was a great day! Long but great. A 4:30 wake up and early flight to Sydney to visit one of the MyDBA clients (that’s my full time job). We were visiting Freshview.com down at Sutherland, south of Sydney, who develop software to create and track email campaigns. They are great guys, who have an incredible success story behind them BUT more importantly they are table tennis fanatics. They have their own full size table in the office, end of week championships and even their own in house computer ranking system. Plenty of technical discussion and plenty of table tennis made for a very enjoyable day.

  There’s about six weeks to go before the World Championships in Japan. I should be playing three more tournaments in Melbourne before then and I hope that will give me enough match practice to at least feel a little familiar when I step out under the bright lights in Yokohama. It doesn’t matter how much training you do if that training doesn’t prepare you for the pressure of comp. It’s always intrigued me why players (even top Australian ones) spend almost all their time hitting big forehand and backhand topspins under circumstances that never occur in high level match play. You can practice topspin against block for 5 hours a day without increasing the chance you’ll ever win a match, certainly not against anyone good! Challenge yourself to learn to serve short with spin, the push short, the spin the ball, to aim for the white lines, to keep your shots low over the net. Spend some time on that and you WILL win more matches.

  Tonight was match night at training. I lasted for over two hours of playing winner goes up, loser goes down sets. Match training is underrated. By match training I mean full on, intense, people getting angry when they lose, grudge matches. Do that until you’re exhausted then force yourself to push a little harder. If you can hold your head and your game together under those conditions then it will definitely do you good when you’ve got to stand up during competition. To be honest I haven’t met a top player who doesn’t have that stubborn, unrelenting streak in them.