An intense dagger workout followed by sparring with wasters. While plastic has its limitations, this can be a good way to identify weaknesses in one’s game. It was observed that left side posta di donna (Joe, on right) has a hard time defending against right posta di donna (Andrew, on left), at least if the defender tries cutting directly into the attack.
A couple of alternative strategies are cutting up from beneath into the attacker’s blade…
…and bringing the sword over the head to the right side, then cutting against the attacker’s blade in a zwerchhau-like movement while thrusting:
As always, glowering is also helpful
Good stuff. Thanks for posting.
S. and N. and I played with this for a while at class Wednesday night. I found that the first approach (shown in the second photo) suffers from a potential timing flaw: if your sword passes in front of the opponent’s, you can end up striking him and then immediately being struck by him as he continues his momentum. The zwerch-like movement depicted in the third photo is interesting. My first instinct was to use a looping stroke of the blade from the reverso side, to perform a mandritto angle cut that would intercept his blade at the proper angle. This approach suffers from bad angle issues — the blades can end up almost parallel and thus, it is not terribly safe. The zwerch-style movement, is, as S. pointed out, a more emphatic version of the mandritto-strike-from-reverso-guard, and as such achieves the proper blade interception. While effective, it also suffers from a) the complexity factor of having to lift it over your head and b) not seeming very Fiorian.
My happy place was performing a wide sloping step with the right foot (right foot moves to the right) and striking a reverso fendente into the path of the blade. I got the line that I wanted, and had the option to strike directly to the opponent if I was fast enough. The position leads nicely into the cut-the-hands-and-stab followup from zogho largo, and also leads into all the stretto plays in which you have the inside line to the opponent’s arms.
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