Come close, and count the strings. Go on. Eighteen down. Not sixteen. Eighteen mains crossing nineteen — and everything strange about this racquet begins there.

An eighteen-main bed is a dense bed, and a dense bed does not let go of the ball the way an open one does. There is less string movement at contact, less snap-back, less free spin, and in exchange you get the thing that cannot be bought any other way: the ball goes where you sent it.

It is the most controlled frame in Tecnifibre's T-Fight line and it is unapologetic about the trade. A head of 630 square centimetres, ninety-eight square inches — small, and deliberately so. Length 68.6 centimetres, twenty-seven inches. It arrives unstrung.

The rest of the file, whispered: 305 grams unstrung, ten point eight ounces.

And underneath, RS Section, a hoop profile fusing square with round for power and control together, and Isoflex, which varies stiffness around the head so that even a dense pattern keeps a workable sweetspot. It is white, which is the colour of things that intend to be taken seriously. It will not rescue a lazy swing and it has no interest in trying.

What it is not is forgiving.

Legnica is the right city for a frame with that much history in it. The Piast castle stands with its courtyard restored. The Gothic cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul went up between 1327 and 1380 — fifty-three years, and the masons who started it were dead before it was finished.

In the church of St John the Baptist lies the mausoleum of the last Piast dukes, a whole dynasty ending in one room. And around the Rynek stand the narrow Herring Houses, still leaning together after everything this town has been through.

Eighteen mains. The ball goes where you sent it. Nothing else comes back changed either.

Buy on Amazon