Thanks for posting! This actually provides a great angle if you want to study closely how the pros play the backhand wall..!

That was great...thank you....( hope to send in an order soon ;-))

thank you !! i will practice with your video :D nice angle

Thanks Paul. Consider wearing those steve cuppings black hats. Your fivehead reflection on the front wall is distracting 😉

Very hard to dislodge shorbagy from the T

It says much for Gregoire's dogged determination that he is almost constantly being outplayed, in every single department of the game, and yet he _still_ manages to keep himself in the contest! Without having seen the rest of the match, I'm guessing that his inability to find a decent line on his length here, was probably mainly due to the physical toll that Shorbagy had exacted during the preceding games - Gregoire is arriving at the ball just that fraction of a second too late to hit through it without a resultant deviation giving Shorbagy an easy mid-court return of the stroke. At times Gregoire looks like an unfortunate mouse being toyed with by a soon-to-be triumphant cat! Nevertheless, he quite remarkably extends the game to be within the reach of an unlikely victory. One that, had he been facing probably pretty much anyone on the planet other than The Beast, he almost surely would have achieved. There are numerous lessons to be drawn here: the importance of defending with a solid length to reduce the physical pressure one is under (Gregoire does admirably in using height to the same effect here); the importance of keeping going, _of not giving up,_ even though one is being systematically outplayed (it's easy to say, but we've all done it. There's a difference between 'going through the motions' - having resigned oneself to defeat - and pushing your body to keep performing the motions, even when you can't envisage anything _but_ a likely defeat); and, finally, the importance of maintaining a game plan, _any_ game plan. Gregoire generally plays a retrieval-based style in any case, but he also usually likes to take every available opportunity to intercept loose mid-court balls, and thus draw his opponent into having to play a faster, more physical, retrieval-based game also (which is simply playing to one's own strengths, of course). But as he is too exhausted to achieve a good enough depth or width he cannot draw loose enough shots from Shorbagy to be able to intercept them from the T. Many people (myself included, back when I played), would react to being deprived of their natural game style by opting to try for lower-margin shots than they usually would. And, especially when you're tired, _and_ your opponent is in the ascendancy, this strategy almost always only hastens the coming defeat. So, despite being 'run ragged' by Shorbagy, Gregoire still valiantly tries to extract a loose ball from his opponent _before_ attempting that rally-ending kill he is longing to play to end the physical torture. And, somewhat amazingly, he largely succeeds in this endeavour. I wasn't counting, but perhaps 4 of his points came directly from this strategy. With the 3 others being from Shorbagy errors. That's 4 points from victory. Close! Very close, considering most of the game looks like a coach conducting a 'conditions routine' with a weary charge. Moreover, looking at things from Shorbagy's perspective, he must have been thinking "what the f*** do I have to do to win here? This guy can hardly even stand up, he's just about literally dead, yet he's still picking off winners against me, _and_ I keep giving him cheap points! This is crazy!" I don't know about anyone else, but I've managed to 'snatch defeat from the jaws of victory' thinking like this before! Anyway, that's why Shorbagy is Shorbagy, and I'm not Shorbagy, haha. But the point is that Gregoire _tries!_ Even though it _is_ Shorbagy, even though he was physically destroyed, even though he couldn't play his usual game, even though he must have felt it was an all-but-impossible task even within himself, Gregoire nevertheless _tries._ He tries _everything._ And he very nearly pulls off an impossible victory... To whom it may concern, thank you for posting this video, besides the personal trip down memory lane, it was nice to see an international game from this angle. Of course, matches need to be shot from the traditional vantage point, but in doing so one loses much of the intimacy that was captured here. Cheers, and best of luck!