A few days ago, Rafael Nadal overcame Nick Kyrgios in three tight sets to progress to the Indian Wells semifinals. As is often the case when Kyrgios is concerned, though, much of the focus was on him, regardless of match result.
Throughout the near three hour tussle, we were treated to the entire repertoire of Nick Kyrgios. From the brilliant to the frustrating, the absurd to the astonishing, there was no shortage in entertainment from Australian.
After racing into a 3-1 lead in the first set by breaking the Nadal serve following a double fault from the Spaniard, Kyrgios went on to hold serve with relative ease for the most part, throwing in a tweener underarm serve, a new addition to his substantial box of tricks. When serving for the set though, he played a couple loose points, and Nadal a few amazing ones, to hand the break back.
Kyrgios blasts a 109 mph forehand winner at 5-5 in the first set. Screenshot: Tennis TV
The tiebreaker played out in a fashion we’ve become accustomed to from Kyrgios over the years. After losing a couple of minibreaks early on due almost certainly to him still ruing the previous service game, Kyrgios tanked the back end of it to lose the tiebreaker by 7 points to 0. Facing six set points at 6-0 down, he told a member of the crowd to “shut the fuck up,” and was handed a point penalty (he had used his soft warning by smashing his racket earlier in the set) to lose the set.
Though he was dialed in for the majority of the set, there were still plenty of the usual Kyrgios antics. At one point, he demanded, not unreasonably, that the umpire silence a member of the crowd. He also branded Nadal lucky after a net cord winner and at another point spat on the court in a show of frustration.
At this point, history suggested that Kyrgios may have given up on the match, or else play expedition tennis with little care for the result.
To his credit though, Kyrgios remained engaged throughout. Maybe it was the clear animosity he has had for Nadal in the past, maybe it was the fact that his schedule now demands that he makes the most of his limited time on court, but there was determination about Kyrgios we rarely get to see.
After a nip and tuck set, Kyrgios did to Nadal what the 21-time Grand Slam champion does so often to his opponents – he broke at the end of the second set to take it 7-5 and force a decider.
The momentum was with Kyrgios at that point and this remained the case for the beginning of the third set as he earned himself another two break points. Nadal ended up fending both of these off, thus bursting Kyrgios’s bubble. The pendulum clearly swung in Nadal’s favour after that as he in turn broke the Kyrgios serve which had been so solid all match.
The aftermath was in many ways as interesting as the match itself. After Nadal sealed victory, Kyrgios smashed a racket which bounced wildly off the court and came within inches of hitting a ball boy’s head. Although Kyrgios did later apologise, it was still a worrying moment and one that could have potentially been really harmful.
If the ballkid wasn't paying attention, that racquet was heading straight at their head. Unfortunately, there is probably a greater chance of things like this ending up on TennisTV with a cute emoji caption than the tours making it clear that it is unacceptable. https://t.co/IrenrZk8pA
When he was asked about the incident in his press conference, Kyrgios was far from impressed with the question.
“Did I throw the racket anywhere near him originally? It landed a metre from my foot and skidded and nearly hit him. I’m human, things happen like that. If I do that a million times over, it wouldn’t have gone that way. It definitely wasn’t like Zverev. It was a complete accident.”
This wasn’t the first time, and almost certainly won’t be the last, that Kyrgios has had an issue with a journalist’s question. Often he has had reason to do so. This however was not such a case. This incident was the latest in what is becoming an increasingly worrying trend. The instance that Kyrgios alluded to with Zverev was undoubtedly far worse than what Kyrgios did but that by no means excuses his own behaviour.
A moment of needless recklessness could have seriously injured a ball boy. It should be said that Kyrgios did meet up with the ball boy the next day, giving him a racket, and by all accounts all was well that ended well but it could have been so different. More worrying than the actual moment was his failure to recognise the potential harm he could have caused. It seems that, only once something more severe does occur, will tennis address the issue of players endangering those around them on court.
The above all being said, Kyrgios did for the most part give an impressive account of himself and that shouldn’t be forgotten. As Nadal mentioned in his post match interview, a motivated Kyrgios is one of the most dangerous players on the tour and that was certainly what we got to see in his match against Nadal.
1. Comparing Alcaraz to the Big Three is not especially helpful. I read a YouTube comment a few weeks ago that described him as having a blend of Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal’s best qualities. This is clearly an exaggeration, and it’s easy to disprove — if Alcaraz really were a package of the Big Three’s best shots, he would have won majors already and would be on course to be a super-GOAT.
What does feel potentially instructive is comparing Alcaraz to other teenage prodigies of the past: namely, young Nadal, even though he is a Big Three member. Back in 2005 in the leadup to Roland-Garros, Nadal was taking scalps left and right. The way he won matches was intriguing — he had a great forehand back then (though it became better), but I think his most piercing weapon was his speed. He was so absurdly fast that no one could hit through him, but at just 18, he could also run at top speed point after point for five hours plus (see the Rome final against Coria). This is why some of his best highlight-reel points are from that year. He had the deadly combination of being lightning-quick and having amazing endurance. Any winner hit against him would have to be a beautiful shot, and even then, sometimes Nadal would sprint for it, swing, and barely miss.
When watching Alcaraz play against Norrie in the quarterfinals, his defense did remind me a little bit of what Nadal did as a really young player. He would make gets at the end of a long sprint, break into a violent slide, then sprint back the other way to get another ball back. At times, he made unbelievable gets to the point that he got back in rallies. I was amazed when Norrie kept his head to finish most of these points anyway.
Alcaraz makes five or six amazing gets in this rally. Afterwards, notice how he jogs a little bit more and doesn’t look out of breath.
All of this isn’t to say that Alcaraz is as good as 2005 Nadal, even the version from before he won Roland-Garros that year. But Alcaraz’s speed and willingness to run after unreachable shots does resemble young Nadal’s to me. It’s a kind of abandon that Nadal has had to give up in the past several years to protect his body. My point is this — Alcaraz may not have the endurance Nadal had (or he might), but a young, fast player willing to run for anything is a spectacle to watch, and an extremely difficult opponent. We’ve had other recent players on the ATP who are great defenders, notably Medvedev, but his style of defense feels different: it’s more reliant on his huge stride length and wingspan, whereas Alcaraz is more of a speed-based defender. Enjoy this part of his game while he’s in his physical prime, because it won’t last forever, or even for his whole career.
2. Alcaraz is the best young breakthrough prospect on the ATP in years. I think there are two main reasons for this. The first is that he has no notable weakness in his game: he’s a better offensive baseliner than Medvedev and Zverev, a better defender than Rublev, a better returner than Tsitsipas. The balance in his game means there is no obvious way to pick apart his game, and that he should be able to have success on all the surfaces, which we’re seeing some of already — when asked if he preferred hard courts or clay, Alcaraz said he felt really comfortable on both.
The second reason is his fantastic return of serve. This is the biggest deficiency in the current generation of ATP players. It’s the central weakness for top players like Tsitsipas, Shapovalov, and Berrettini. Alcaraz, though, is a great returner. In the past 52 weeks, he has the fourth-best return of serve rating on tour, trailing only Djokovic, Nadal, and Schwartzman. At the Australian Open against Berrettini, Alcaraz broke his rival four times despite the big-serving Italian nailing an incredible 71% of his first serves. With this asset, Alcaraz will rarely find himself struggling to break serve, meaning he’ll have an edge when his opponent serves to stay in a set or a match, along with feeling more comfortable in practically every matchup.
3. Going into the match, I found it difficult to imagine a scenario in which I would be disappointed with Alcaraz’s tournament. Alcaraz had been playing so well that he cast serious doubts over who the favorite was…and his opponent was 19-0 in 2022! That seems like a success no matter the result of the match. Plus, Alcaraz is 18 years old and has played a Big Three member all of once in his career (Nadal in Madrid last year). So while the match was a great opportunity to score the biggest win of his career, it also felt relatively pressure-free.
4. Similarly, though Nadal surely expected himself to win, I didn’t see it as a failure on his part had he lost. His winning streak, while amazing, also didn’t seem to carry a ton of pressure. His year has already exceeded expectations by a huge margin, and with the clay season ahead, a loss on hard court (even in a Masters 1000 semifinal) wouldn’t have felt that important.
5. On the first point, Alcaraz soaked up a couple crosscourt forehands from Nadal, then banged an inside-in forehand winner clocked at 95 mph. A few points later, he broke Nadal to 15 by obliterating a crosscourt backhand winner. So no initial nerves, you could say.
6. It was clear early on, like first-game early, that Nadal was going to have to play very well to make headway. The one point he won behind his serve in the opening game was when Alcaraz missed a forehand long that he should have hit for a winner.
7. Alcaraz’s forehand drop shot, a devastating weapon given the huge power he can produce from the same wing, made its first appearance when he served at 1-0, break point. It was a winner.
8. Indian Wells has windy conditions, and when the gales blew as Nadal crouched in his return position, it became clear just how little hair is left on that 35-year-old head.
9. A Tennis Channel graphic displayed that so far in the tournament (as of 1-0 and deuce #3 on Alcaraz’s serve in the first set), Alcaraz has been hitting his forehand both faster than Nadal on average, 76 mph to 73, and with more spin, 3143 RPMs to 3051. That is something.
10. Early on, Alcaraz was playing with relentless aggressive intent. He’s wasn’t being reckless — his shots were well within the lines — but he was trying to take control of every point, and his shots carried enormous pace. Nadal had to do a lot of defending, a trend that continued for much of the match.
11. Nadal tried to set up forehands a couple times by slicing to Alcaraz’s backhand, but the younger Spaniard’s incredible foot speed helped him move around the ball to crush a forehand.
12. Alcaraz consolidated the break from the first game after saving five break points. He looks so confident, all the time. Winner count at this moment: Alcaraz 8, Nadal 0.
13. At 0-2, 30-all, Nadal took a chance and tried a huge second serve out wide. He made it and dispatched the return with a swing volley winner. This speaks to his willingness to step out of his comfort zone, but that he was being made to do so that early speaks to what a brutal opponent Alcaraz is.
14. Alcaraz took lots of backhands early (as the match went on, Nadal had more success pushing Alcaraz back), which is important for two reasons: it takes time away from Nadal and prevents Alcaraz from having to hit backhands at head-height.
15. Alcaraz’s biggest challenge in this matchup seems to be holding serve. Most of his serves in the first set came back, and most of his second serves came back deep. After having to save five break points in his 1-0 service game, he got broken at 15 in his 2-1 service game.
16. Around the fifth game, I was reminded of how Alcaraz began his match against Berrettini at the Australian Open. Though he lost the first set 6-2, he actually started out in god mode — in the first four games, he played so well that I tweeted he would win the match, possibly in straight sets. After the fourth game, though, his level dove off a cliff and didn’t come back until the middle of the second set. In this match, it wasn’t as if he started to play badly, but his level did go down after the second game. It’s amazing that the 18-year-old seems not to suffer from nerves, but I wonder if redlining at the beginning of a match, even successfully, can affect him negatively when he starts to miss. Alcaraz starting a match in red-hot form and then cooling off fairly quickly may be a trend to keep an eye on.
17. Unforced error count as Alcaraz served at 2-3, 40-30: Alcaraz 14, Nadal 4. Moments later, Nadal engaged Alcaraz in a risky deuce-court rally (his backhand, his weaker wing, going to the stronger forehand wing of Alcaraz), and won it with a gigantic crosscourt backhand his junior could barely get a racket on.
18. Nadal had a patch of utter brilliance in the 3-2 game. After his huge crosscourt backhand, he passed Alcaraz with a crosscourt forehand to set up break point. Alcaraz unleashed a 114 mph second serve, and Nadal responded with a forehand return winner down the line. Y’know, run of the mill stuff.
19. Through the first six or seven games, Nadal served with much more success than Alcaraz. He made more first serves and was able to hold with less stress than Alcaraz, whose only service hold had come after saving five break points.
20. Alcaraz’s speed really limited Nadal’s ability to play drop shots. He ran down two of them successfully in the 2-4 game, contributing to the eventual break-back.
21. The first seven games took 48 minutes, an average of almost seven minutes per game. Early in the third set, the average game length had actually increased to a little over seven minutes.
22. Alcaraz really struggled with his serve in the first set — at 3-4, love-30, he had made below 50% of his first serves. The problem is, when he takes pace off the first serve, it comes back deep and Nadal begins the ensuing rally with the advantage. Alcaraz was hitting crazy speeds on the radar gun (up to 142 mph), but it’s not doing him any good since the serves he makes haven’t been that close to the lines.
23. Shortly after I typed that, Alcaraz hit a good slider out wide that set up an easy volley when down 3-4, 15-40, then followed it up with a service winner.
24. Alcaraz saved a total of four break points at 3-4 to hold serve again. Nadal has converted two of his first 12 break points. Alcaraz? Two of two.
25. Both players are so proficient at punishing the opponent’s second serve. Each of them was clearly aware of this, going for huge second serves at times in an attempt to break the pattern.
26. On his fourth set point and 17th break point in the first set, Nadal reached an Alcaraz drop shot in plenty of time, but overcooked his putaway. It was a bad mistake. Unswayed, Nadal then won the next two points to close out the first set, 6-4 (in 67 minutes!).
27. There are two ways to look at the first-set break point statistics from Alcaraz’s perspective. He saved 14 of 17 break points against one of the best players of all time. That’s great! But having to face 17 break points in a single set is far from ideal. Alcaraz played five service games in the first set. He got broken in three and escaped with the other two by the skin of his teeth, saving five break points to hold at 1-0 and another four to hold at 3-4. His serve was under an absolute siege. My suggestion would be to aim for the lines on his serve at any pace — Nadal seems unbothered by central serves, no matter how hard they are. Alcaraz needs to keep Nadal guessing rather than trying to overwhelm his elder with pace. (Alcaraz adopted this strategy to good success, starting in the second set.)
28. Nadal is better served trying to hit the ball past Alcaraz than by trying to fool him with drop shots. Alcaraz is too fast, and too good of a vertical mover, for them to work very well.
29. At 0-1 in the second set, Alcaraz finally held serve without immense strain, dropping just a single point.
30. Nadal’s baseline prowess continues to amaze, long past his physical prime. He won a 26-shot rally at 1-1, love-15 in the second set. This was the 13th rally of more than nine shots, with Nadal having won eight to Alcaraz’s five.
31. The wind kicked up fiercely at the start of the second set. The towels got blown off the players’ benches. At one point a wrapper of some kind flew through Nadal’s side of the court in the middle of a rally. Rallies grew more tentative, with each guy focusing on spin and margin for error rather than aggression.
32. Nadal’s rally shot, already difficult to deal with due to its spin, becomes truly hellish in the wind.
33. Alcaraz did a better job of this early in the match than late, but he hasn’t tried to pick apart Nadal’s backhand very much. His forehand is good enough to inflict some serious pain in the crosscourt pattern from the deuce side, but he hasn’t made the most of his potential profits. It doesn’t feel like he’s appropriately wary of Nadal’s forehand.
34. For all the (deserved) talk of Nadal being a great player in the wind, Alcaraz was the better player for the first few games of the second set, losing just one point on serve across two service games and breaking Nadal for 3-2. The 21-time major champion had a couple disastrous misses in the 2-all game.
35. Alcaraz’s inability to hold serve comfortably hurt him in this match in a bunch of ways, but perhaps most notably it stopped him from being able to hold on to a lead. Consolidating breaks is crucial, particularly against a better opponent. I was reminded of the Sinner-Nadal match in Rome last year — Sinner broke Nadal three times, but was immediately broken back twice and lost in straight sets. Holding serve and breaking serve are both vital, but on their own, they’re not sufficient to win a match. Despite Nadal being broken several times, it never really seemed like he needed to stress too much since he could usually count on a break himself.
36. Nadal usually does very well at net, in part due to him largely volleying behind great approach shots. He didn’t have a great day at net for most of this match. His timing was a bit off, but Alcaraz also got to some shots few others would have, and hit some great low passing shots.
37. The wind wrecked the very good quality of play achieved by both players in the first set. Shots were blown ten feet away from the spot they would have landed under normal conditions. The commentators started to entertain the idea that the conditions were too windy to be playable. A minute, or more, would go by between points (not that either player is at all at fault for this; it’s difficult to serve when dust has blown into your eyes. It just doesn’t make for the most interesting viewing). May Alcaraz and Nadal play again soon on a calmer day, or under a roof.
💨💨💨💨
The wind is blowing over ALL lose items besides those precious water bottles!
38. Paul Annacone: “I’m afraid it [the wind] is gonna blow the posts out of the ground.”
39. With Nadal serving at 4-4, 15-30 in the second set, a pole of some kind blew off the net. The chair umpire and a ballgirl worked together to reattach it. The crowd cheered. The fantastic tennis of the first several games of the match felt like they happened about a million years earlier.
40. Nadal and Alcaraz found enough consistency to play a long rally that ended with Nadal nailing a crosscourt backhand winner to save his first break point of the match (at 4-4, 15-40 in the second set).
41. Even in hurricane-force winds, Alcaraz produced a couple sterling backhands in the endless 4-all game and Nadal came up with a crazy reflex volley to save a break point.
42. The wind gave the match an almost comedic feel; it was hard to imagine either player getting aggravated over a miss, because any errant shot was at least partly wind-induced. Nadal saved six break points at 4-all in the second set, and the game didn’t feel like it had much tension, though it did feature some insane shots from both players.
OK, tbf the match is pretty entertaining in all of its terribleness.
43. On his seventh break point, Alcaraz broke Nadal with a beautiful backhand lob winner. At deuce in the following game, having lost out on two set points to great backhands from Nadal, Alcaraz hit an acrobatic stretch volley winner on a ball that looked to be past him already. That anyone could stay calm enough to hit hot shots in the eye of a storm is amazing, but Alcaraz doing it in the biggest match of his life is quite special.
44. Alcaraz outperforming Nadal at net was one of the more notable happenings of this match. He hit a couple incredibly low-percentage half-volley winners, he made most of his putaways, and he largely came in at the right times.
45. Alcaraz did a great job adjusting after the first set, taking pace off his serves for increased accuracy. He started to hold much more comfortably early in the second set, a trend that continued for some time.
46. When the wind did slacken, Nadal and Alcaraz treated us to some fantastic rallies, some stretching to over 20 shots. The quality of the match rose dramatically early in the third set.
47. Under pressure in the fifth game of the decider, Nadal did some amazing things, hitting winners at love-15, 15-30, 30-40, and ad-out. On the second deuce of the game, he hit a sprawling volley for a winner. Had you taken a photo of Nadal as he made contact with the ball, I’m pretty sure his body would have resembled an airborne spider having a seizure.
48. At least four or five games in the match went for longer than ten minutes. Ad-scoring forever.
49. I mentioned Alcaraz’s speed before, but his quickness totally transformed this match. It’s like he completely took away the drop volley option from Nadal. Time and again, Nadal would push him back and feather a volley short in the court, and time and again, Alcaraz would be up next to it, ready to take a swing before it even dropped below waist-height. Even when he didn’t hit a winning pass and Nadal ended up winning the point, it felt like a big statement had been made.
50. Much is made these days of Nadal’s net skills. On a day when he won a percentage of points at net far lower than he would find ideal, the man still managed to hit several reflex/stretch volleys that made fans’ minds explode.
51. With Alcaraz serving at 3-4, 30-40, Nadal found himself with his first break point chance since the middle of the second set. He crushed the first forehand he got a look at, then flew up to the net and dispatched Alcaraz’s sliced reply for a winner. It was brutal — just peak Nadal, hanging around until the opportunity presented itself, then taking it with both hands.
Serving for the match, Nadal held at love in what felt like 30 seconds. At 3-4, Alcaraz hadn’t done too much wrong — he double faulted on the first point, then went for too much on a forehand at 30-all, but hadn’t faced pressure on serve for an entire set. Nadal barged through the opening, winning six straight points in short order. Good match, kid, but you’ll have to do better than that.
52. Nadal has now won 20 matches in a row. He can equal Djokovic’s record of 37 Masters 1000 titles by beating Taylor Fritz in the final. The clay season is coming up.
Surely this winning streak will end at some point, but when? Nadal might well lose in Madrid, but for the next few months at least, he’s not going to play a match in which he’s not the favorite. I’m not saying he’s going to sweep the clay season, but I think a couple Masters 1000s and yet another Roland-Garros title are far from out of the question. He’s got more momentum behind him that he’s had for years. He would remain a solid underdog against Djokovic on grass or hard courts, but a matchup like that is on the horizon at the closest. If Nadal remains relatively pain-free (we know his foot has been bugging him a bit), it seems like it will take a monumental performance to snap this winning streak. Nadal says he doesn’t care about the #1 ranking, but he might well find himself there soon anyway. He’s got a huge lead in the Race that will surely extend during the clay season.
What is most impressive about this win over Alcaraz is that Nadal really wasn’t playing great tennis this tournament, yet when the situation demanded it, he played not just competently but brilliantly. I can’t get the way he played his lone break point in the third set out of my head — Nadal had been under pressure for most of the set, so much so that the break point appeared almost out of nowhere. Nadal banged a forehand down the line, appeared at net as if conjured from thin air, and put away the easy volley. As they say, he took his chances.
53. Alcaraz might still be shaking his head at how quickly this match slipped away from him — he served at 3-4, 30-15 after having barely lost a point on serve all set, then lost seven points in a row and it was over. That shouldn’t take away how well he played this match, though. Early on, his service struggles looked to be dooming him, but Alcaraz totally solved that problem by the second half of the match, beginning to hold easily rather than facing an epic tussle each service game. He wasn’t far away from winning this match.
Nadal said in his post-match interview that Alcaraz is already one of the best players in the world, and he played the 18-year-old as such. Nadal is right. Alcaraz will rise to 16th in the world in short order. He will probably be comfortably inside the top 10 come Roland-Garros. He played very well today, but there were things he could have done better — it was more that he didn’t play quite well enough than that he wasn’t a good enough player. At 18 years old (18 years old!) he forced Nadal into quite a few uncomfortable positions. Rafa saved himself from defeat with some extremely low-percentage reflex volleys and some fantastic opportunistic aggression late in the third. Who else of Nadal’s recent opponents can say this?
Returning to the initial thought on this list, the comparison to young Nadal: Alcaraz will probably not follow in his countryman’s footsteps by winning Roland-Garros. But his amazing sprint to the top of the game isn’t slowing. His speed, timing, return of serve, and coolheadedness played a huge part in this match; from that huge second serve at 0-2, 30-all in the first set to the reflex volleys in the third, Nadal had to adjust his game significantly to meet the Alcaraz challenge.
This challenge will only grow as the season progresses.
On March 16th, it was announced that the major championships would trial for 12 months ending matches with a 10-point tie-break should the final set reach six games all for both men and women. My immediate reaction, as was the case for many, was negative.
My first thought was that we would now lose opportunities for epic matches. Had this rule been in place much sooner, the classic men’s Wimbledon finals of 2008, 2009 and 2019 would all have been decided by tie-breaks. In addition, two of the best Nadal/Djokovic clashes, Roland Garros 2013 and Wimbledon 2018, would not have lasted as long as they did. The battles between Novak Djokovic and Stan Wawrinka at the Australian Open in 2013 and 2014 would have been disappointingly shortened. I need to rewatch those matches to decide if this would have made a significant difference, but I guarantee that amazing moments would have been lost and the flow of the match would have been very different. We definitely would not have seen Federer miss two championship points in 2019, instead just skipping to a disappointing tie-break earlier, at 6-all in the fifth. Likewise in the Wimbledon 2018 semi-final, we would have missed out on the epic Djokovic hold of serve at 7-7 (in which he saved three break points) and wouldn’t have seen Nadal win an epic rally at 7-8, 15-30, then save a match point later that game. A ten-point deciding tie-break would have changed the story of the match (not necessarily the outcome, that would have been even more up in the air).
The 12-all tiebreak will remain a one-time sight in the Wimbledon final. The 12-all tiebreak has taken place all of two times since its implementation before the 2019 Championships. Screenshot: Wimbledon
On an emotional level, I will miss the need to break serve to win the match in the final set. It adds that extra tension, that extra challenge. Now it’ll just come down to who plays better in a condensed shootout, which is a completely different dynamic. Tie-breaks can produce incredible drama if they’re close, but are far worse damp squibs when they’re not. There will also be fewer critical points happening in a match as it takes far less effort to earn a mini-break than to win a whole game against serve.
So, why have the majors done this? Well, as Owen has pointed out, we can thank John Isner for his role in their decision. He was involved in the two longest matches ever, both going on for hours and hours. The first (Wimbledon 2010) was a weird anomaly, the highlight of the tournament. The latter (Wimbledon 2018) resulted in a flop of a final. Now, Isner isn’t the only one who seems to drag matches out. Other big servers like Kevin Anderson, Marin Čilić, Sam Querrey and Ivo Karlović are to blame. You also have those fighters like Stan Wawrinka, Fernando Verdasco and Mackenzie McDonald who just will not give up and run everything down to the end.
Whether a player is just unbreakable on serve or continues to grind and not go away, the men have a way of extending their matches. The result is that we have very long matches which are difficult to market on TV. When I try to introduce my friends to the sport, they always ask “what time does it finish?” My answer is always “I don’t know”. For me, that’s one of the best parts of the sport. However, a lack of definitive end may put people off. I don’t think a match lasting four, five, or even six hours is a problem, provided it doesn’t go much longer. Whilst the existing fanbase is important, tennis cannot rely on it for long term success.
Where I do agree with the majors is having consistency between them in how matches are played and decided. Again, explaining to newer fans that different majors decide matches differently does overcomplicate things for them. So, from a perspective of trying to get new fans, the decision makes sense.
Let’s take a reality check, and ask whether the decision was necessary. Since 2008, there have been 151 major men’s matches that went past a 6-6 score in the fifth set (not including US Open tie-breaks). That’s an average of 10 to 11 per year across all majors. However, not all majors contribute to this equally. Roland-Garros doesn’t often produce matches with high game counts, whereas this happens far more at Wimbledon (probably because of the varying effects of big serves on clay and grass). Essentially, a marathon men’s match is now a regular event, which causes headaches for tournament schedulers and TV broadcasters.
It has to be said, we have romanticised these long battles to a certain extent. It’s very rare for such long matches to be high quality, unless it involves one or two of Djokovic, Nadal or Federer. The reality is, most of these marathons are played in the early rounds of a major, usually involving good players but none that are likely to win a big title. Dragging out a medium quality match isn’t necessarily a great spectacle, even if we love the tension and drama. In fact, of the matches that have gone really long (beyond a 12-12 score), only one could be seen as really special (Wimbledon 2009 final).
Most of these 151 matches that would now be in tie-break territory under the new rules were decided by a score of 8-6 anyway. To me, this suggests that a tie-break for those matches would produce a similar level of drama given the match was drawing to a natural conclusion anyway. So, I am willing to concede that introducing a tie-break into the deciding set might be a good idea. The impact on the overall sport, in terms of numbers, is minimal, and reduces the impact of some more frustrating elements.
However, I still can’t shake the sense that tennis is denying itself future classics. They’ve gone with the simpler method of the Australian Open model of deciding a final set. However, I’d suggest a hybrid of the AO and Wimbledon models. Of the 151 men’s matches mentioned, only 15 (so around 10%) went past the 12-12 score. This is still a very rare event, even more rarely are such matches classics. So, I think Wimbledon were right to put a tie-break at this point. Making this a ten-point tie-breaker extends that drama and makes a match’s final moments even more special. It adds a unique element that would only be seen in exceptional circumstances.
Of course, this has focused on the men’s game, which is where most of the delays come from. Looking at the women’s game over the same period, there have been 153 matches that went past a 6-6 score in a deciding set. The trends are much the same, but some are more exaggerated. The vast majority were decided by an 8-6 score, so a tie-break wouldn’t have much impact on many women’s matches. In fact, only four real marathon matches have taken place since 2008, going beyond a 12-12 score in the deciding set. These are Gorges vs Srebotnik (Wimbledon 2008), Kuznetsova vs Schiavone (Australia 2011), Rybáriková vs Muguruza (Australia 2013) and Halep vs Davis (Australia 2018). None of these involve a clash between really big names, except for the Australia 2011 match. In fact, most extended deciding sets for women in recent years happen in the early rounds. For whatever reason, the top players don’t often get epic scorelines playing against one another. Essentially, this rule change will probably have a much smaller impact on the women’s game in comparison. Extended deciding sets on the women’s side haven’t been as much of a talking point – even with a 15-13 final set, the best-of-three format keeps matches from reaching, say, four hours in length. However, this change could deny us an epic that could capture the imagination, and finally put the women on the same level as the men in mainstream media coverage. Imagine if we get a Barty vs Osaka Australian Open final ending with a 9-7 deciding set score. Or Świątek vs Halep at Roland Garros, Raducanu vs Gauff at Wimbledon or even Fernandez vs Andreescu in New York. We probably will never quite get this with a 6-6 final set decider. We would with a 12-12 final set decider.
In summary, once I get over the initial emotional reaction and look at the detail, I can see why the majors have made this decision and agree with a lot of their reasoning. I just feel we still need room for those special moments of critical and decisive breaks in a long decider that can produce really special moments. By introducing this hybrid AO/Wimbledon model, we still get our classics whilst also managing to put a lid on any match that looks to be going unnecessarily long or overly dragging out a mediocre contest.
Last Tuesday, Jenson Brooksby defeated his first top-five opponent.
The victim of his incessant fist-pumps and come-on-ing?
Stefanos Tsitsipas.
It had definitely been on the horizon. Brooksby has played three top-five players and won a set in all three matches – breadsticking Novak in New York, doing decently against Zverev at Indian Wells last October and holding match points against the umpire abuser in Acapulco (to think… if he’d converted one of those match points, that poor umpire probably wouldn’t have gotten the fright of his life as their match dragged on until 5 in the morning).
After being defeated by Brooksby, Tsitsipas was left scratching his salty wee noggin.
“He’s not a very explosive player… but he’s able to get balls back. He’s not the most athletic player, as well. He’s just able to read the game well, play with his pace, play with the opponent’s pace. He’s able to read the game well and stay consistent. There’s nothing that he has that kills, I would say.”
Not explosive? Not the most athletic player? Nothing that kills? Brooksby’s just defeated a top-five player, has won at least three matches in six of his last ten events and is the fifth-youngest player in the top-50…
… and like Tsitsipas, you’re probably wondering how he’s finding so much success.
Brooksby revealed his secret after the match.
“I think my superpower would be exploiting weaknesses in other people.”
Screenshot: Tennis TV
How Brooksby defeated Tsitsipas
Tsitsipas isn’t entirely wrong on some aspects of Jenson’s game.
But from the back of the court, I disagree with his assessment. Brooksby is able to attack on either wing – he can measure flat forehands into slowly opened up portions of the court and has an insanely versatile backhand, choosing either direction on the rise with confidence and throwing in the occasional disguised two-handed slice to keep his opponent pulling his luscious locks out.
But on serve, whoah boy is there work to do. Brooksby is… around 6’4”, supposedly the same height as Tsitsipas… Though the cover photo for this article would suggest he’s maybe a couple of inches shorter.
Either way, he’s significantly taller than the Diego Schwartzmans and Kei Nishikoris of this world yet held the fourth-lowest ace percentage of any top-50 player in 2021.
(Quick side note on this: Brooksby’s serve will definitely need to improve but he actually still won quite a few cheap points off of it despite it’s lack of explosivity – 20% of Brooksby’s serves went unreturned to Tsitsipas’s 19%… If you’re gonna get salty, at least prove your weapon is bigger than your opponents!)
The serve’s not where he has been winning matches nor was it what made the difference in this one. No, Brooksby has an innate ability to when and where to pull the trigger, of when to step into the baseline and when to hang back – as Tsitsipas said, his ability to read the game and to work with the pace of the ball.
It’s not something Tsitsipas really got to grips with, very frequently finding himself locked into a cross-court backhand battle.
Tsitsipas goes down the line to escape the uncomfortable ad-court duel, but in doing so leaves Brooksby the opening to hit a forehand crosscourt into open space.
I’d love the stats on Brooksby’s backhand placement because it felt like Brooksby found the width required to make Tsitsipas perpetually uncomfortable on this wing. This width meant Tsitsipas very rarely got the opportunity to hit an inside-out forehand without doing some tricky footwork and couldn’t go backhand line with as much ease as he is used to (at 4-2, 15-15, we actually heard Brooksby say “You gotta get to the backhand first” when he pulled the trigger too early on a crosscourt forehand that Tsitsipas rifled back crosscourt).
Brooksby again hits to Tsitsipas’s forehand after forcing that side of the court open.
The easy width Brooksby gets on his backhand is clear from the above rally. When Tsitsipas does go line, Brooksby gets the mid-court ball he’s looking for to attack the Greek’s stronger wing.
Drag him out wide, he’ll drag you out just as wide. Hit it hard, he’ll hit it just as hard but into a better spot in the court.
The other way in which Brooksby damages his opponent is in his ability to take on the return. Brooksby steps into the court before his opponent serves, using his momentum and ability to take the ball on the rise to completely neutralise his opponent’s serves, often on the second and sometimes on the first.
Tsitsipas finished the match with his lowest percentage of first-serve points won in any match this year (as Brooksby develops, I don’t doubt we’ll see him crack the top-10 in first-serve return points won).
Attacking the forehand, taking on Stef’s serve early… Brooksby exploits weakness his opponents didn’t even know were there.
The future for Jenson
Brooksby went on to lose pretty badly to defending champ Cam Norrie.
He was broken five times, his lack of serving ability leaving Norrie untroubled (9% of Brooksby’s serves went unreturned).
His usual strengths had little effect on his opponent’s leftiness – the width Brooksby can get on his backhand didn’t do damage to Cam’s forehand and his flat-attacking forehand was left a little ruffled by Norrie’s even-flatter-and-steadier backhand, the lack of pace on the ball almost doing him more harm than a typical blasted pro forehand cross-court.
He couldn’t slice down the line reliably to goad an error from Norrie’s low backhand due to having to go over the highest part of the net.
Still, even in this loss we could see the cogs whirring, Brooksby starting to work out an opponent that clearly wasn’t the best match-up for him. He switched from trying to attack from the deuce court into Norrie’s backhand to doubling down on the Brit’s forehand, looking for a ball he could go inside-in with – he found some success doing this but couldn’t maintain the level of execution required to pull it off.
I am left fascinated by how far Brooksby can go.
He is so ready and willing to change up how he’s playing to find a way to win. Surely, without something that can kill, without the explosive power of other players, the tennis IQ of the young man alone could see him in the top-20…
… within a year?
Stef – wash away that salt and give the guy a round of applause. Jenson Brooksby’s a better player than you’ve given him credit for.
Many of the familiar faces in tennis press conferences belong to older journalists who have been at their jobs for a long time. Tumaini Carayol stands out. He is not yet 30, but already has almost a decade and a half of experience covering tennis, from blogging to professional writing. His journey so far has taken him down a handful of different freelancing routes over the past ten years, before finally landing with The Guardian in August of 2019. He is now their only full-time tennis writer. As one of the youngest professional tennis journalists in the world, his career has many big moments to come. “To be honest, I still feel like I’m just beginning,” Carayol says. “I’m hoping [my proudest moment] is in the future!”
Carayol speaking with Frances Tiafoe. Photo via Tumaini Carayol
It’s safe to say, then, that Carayol is uniquely positioned to offer insight into the state of tennis. With all the controversy in the game over the past months – Peng Shuai, domestic violence allegations against Alexander Zverev, Novak Djokovic getting deported from Australia – what kind of place is tennis in? How is our sport doing?
“I’d say this hasn’t been the best period for tennis,” Carayol begins. “For whatever reason, the pandemic seems to have – and not in all cases, but in some cases – have led to a lot of issues and exposed a lot of issues within tennis. Certain things have come to the floor that I’m sure have made people – fans, followers – think about things other than tennis and look at their favorite players and the people they follow in a different light.”
It would be easy for Carayol to avoid mentioning specifics here but he embraces the opportunity to do the exact opposite. “In terms of a lot of those issues, there has been a lot of negativity and…it feels weird to group them together because a lot of them are very different things, but we’ve seen how the tours in some ways haven’t modernized, or aren’t in tune with how professionals and governing bodies are expected to act in 2022 or 2021. It took a year for them [the ATP] to even properly address the allegations against [Alexander] Zverev. Certain ways that the pandemic has been handled…of course there’s issues about things that we’re constantly talking about – the gap between earnings with the top of the game compared to the bottom of the game. So in that sense, I’d say that things have not been great.”
Carayol clarifies that it’s not all bad news in tennis currently. “I still do think that as a whole, there is a positive side, and we’ve seen how even when there’s nobody watching, even when circumstances are completely different to normal, how entertaining the sport is,” he says. “No matter how it’s packaged, tennis is still a great sport fundamentally. We’re at a point where the old guard and a lot of the best players in the world from the last couple of decades are coming towards the end of their careers. I think what is clear is what Rafa Nadal always says: that new players are coming along, new faces and interesting stories. From that side, I’d say there are positives and negatives.”
Carayol rounds out his answer by mentioning certain stories within tennis that have had the innate ability to transcend the sport. He pinpoints Djokovic’s recent controversy before citing Naomi Osaka’s Indian Wells heckling situation as “one of the biggest stories on The Guardian newspaper yesterday!” He finishes, however, with a hint of annoyance in terms of how stories such as these gain traction but offer nothing substantial when it comes to growing the sport. “In that sense, it’s not always a good thing, since people consume these certain stories – even if they’re not negative, they’re sensational stories, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to watch the third round of Indian Wells, and that’s the frustrating part as well.”
*****
Carayol has been in close proximity to tennis since his childhood. “My mom used to play tennis and she got me into it from a young age,” he says. He started to play more and more often, going to his local tennis club six times a week to play. “It was all I was really doing.”
At 15, Carayol injured his back badly, meaning he could no longer play with such frequency. He turned to writing – first a blog called Foot Fault, which he used to cover his first tournament: WTA Linz in 2010. Carayol began university a few years later, but still tried to go to any event he could.
What drew him to tennis specifically? “Everyone I know plays football, I have a couple of footballers in the family, so I always wanted to just do something different to everyone.” He laughs. “So I played tennis.”
*****
Carayol’s first big break came when he began writing liveblogs for Eurosport in 2014. The first big tournament he covered – the Australian Open – coincided directly with his first year of university exams. “I went to university in Chester, which is towards the north of England, near Liverpool,” Carayol remembers. Eurosport’s offices were in London, making for a tricky commute. A less dedicated individual might have pressed pause on their career plans until more time opened up, but Carayol wasn’t going to miss out on this opportunity.
“I was daily going back and forth from Chester to London, doing my Australian Open shifts, starting at midnight, going to midday, then going back and doing an exam, then going back…so it was kind of crazy,” he says. Despite the hectic schedule, he has no regrets. Eurosport recognized his commitment and called him back to do more writing, some of it on-site.
Carayol notes that had he not spoken to the right people at a few key moments, his career might have panned out differently. “It’s a very closed profession, at least to me, it felt very hard, almost impossible, to break in at a lot of points,” he says.
Now, though, Carayol is firmly entrenched in tennis journalism. He has been writing for The Guardian since August in 2019. The full-time job comes with deadlines, which can be difficult in light of the wide range of how long a tennis match can be, but Carayol is yet to miss one.
He still writes some liveblogs, but also gets to do features, having recently covered the electrifying Jelena Ostapenko. Features have a more generous time frame; he has closer to five days to finish the piece.
*****
In 2013, Carayol covered the Madrid Masters for Tennis Panorama News. He sat in on a Roger Federer press conference and tweeted a quote from the Swiss. Neil Harman, then an established tennis correspondent for The Times, replied “I would like it if you would not put the whole press conference on Twitter. It is most annoying.”
This odd complaint highlights how social media has changed tennis journalism. Posting quotes or even entire transcripts on Twitter is now commonplace. There is less exclusivity surrounding player access; the pandemic has revealed that it’s very possible to cover tournaments remotely. “There was a lot of friction and a lot of people who were against it,” says Carayol with regards to Twitter journalism. “Things have changed now, and I hope that people are more accepting of younger journalists and people who are just there in the press room or virtual press conferences, who are just there to get experience and write more. I certainly wouldn’t ever try to be the way that people were in the past.”
Even in 2013, Carayol’s sentiment was echoed by many fans. The Tennis Panorama News tweet is still up, and the responses indicate people’s desire and appreciation for quick information. If exclusive access is necessary for certain tennis journalists to do their job, you could argue they could be positively replaced.
Federer: "I was lacking control from the baseline, and that pretty much carried through from start to finish."
— Tennis Panorama News (@TennisNewsTPN) May 9, 2013
Social media backlash continues to be an occupational hazard of sharing information or writing. “Obviously there are certain issues that people are not going to be happy about. I mean, the obvious example is Djokovic in terms of certain things that have happened over the past couple of years,” Carayol points out. He has been accused of bias by some diehard Djokovic fans, but has also written plenty of complimentary pieces about the great Serb. “You’ll get people who think that I’m always attacking Djokovic and so when I’ve been complimentary, you get people like ‘oh, he’s on Djokovic’s payroll!’ So if you’re pissing everyone off, that’s probably a good thing, I guess!” Carayol laughs.
In the end, though, Carayol is concerned with the truth above all else: “I’m fine with people getting upset. I am just trying to write what I think is correct and if people disagree, that’s fine by me, really.”
*****
Tennis is a difficult sport to write about. A seasoned fan watching the five-and-a-half hour Australian Open final between Rafael Nadal and Daniil Medvedev would probably have been transfixed, but capturing the essence of that final, especially to present to a casual fan or someone not connected to the sport at all, is a challenge. “I kept making notes of shots and points that seemed to be a defining moment of the match but then half an hour later, it was a footnote,” Carayol says.
The urge to capture a whole match is understandable, but recounting all the small chances and momentum shifts of the match would have been tedious to read. Just imagine: after going up a break in the second set, Nadal handed back the advantage, only to reclaim it by breaking for 5-3. He had several opportunities to close out the set, including a set point, but was broken back after a marathon game. Nadal then fought through a long service game at 5-all, alternating down-the-line missiles and tired shots into the bottom of the net. In the tiebreak, Medvedev fell behind 0-2 and 3-5, but launched a brilliant comeback to take the set, finishing with a sliding, acrobatic backhand passing shot down the line.
Some point description is nice, but that started to put you to sleep, didn’t it? And that lengthy blurb covered only part of the second set in a match composed of five long stanzas. “I enjoy writing that’s descriptive and is flowing and is pleasant on the eye but it doesn’t always have to be that way,” Carayol opines. “I think the best writing for me in some way captures the moment, the players, the different personalities and why people should care about it. I do think that there are many different styles of writing that can accomplish that and I think that’s probably the key.”
Carayol’s writing covers the full range of the sport, not just the forehands and backhands. His recent profile of Jelena Ostapenko didn’t just detail how aggressive her style of play is, but explained how her mindset enables her to try shots others wouldn’t dream of attempting and how her disdain for more passive styles accentuates her aggression. Players’ personalities do not mirror their styles, but there are often threads that connect the two, and seizing on these in writing makes accounts of the game more compelling.
*****
For the longest time, both the WTA and the ATP have been reliant on big names to promote the sport for them. The Williams sisters and Naomi Osaka have been standouts for the women, while the obvious domination of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic on the men’s side have threatened to overshadow all else in tennis for a decade and a half.
How does Carayol see the state of the game 10 years from now when these icons have hung up their rackets? He takes a moment to consider and smiles before responding. “You’ve seen the L’Equipe prediction from maybe 10 years ago. They predicted the rankings, and they had Benoît Paire as world number two. I hope this doesn’t end like that and someone sends me this article in ten years,” he laughs. “But I don’t think, at least for many years, there’ll be something like what we’ve seen in the men’s game like what’s happened with Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, all pushing each other – and Murray as well – to a point where they were all monopolizing these big tournaments… I don’t think we’ll see that again. I think there will be more parity.”
Oopsie.
If that’s the case, how will the game look to market itself in the absence of an all-dominating faction of players? “I think when the Big 3 finally retire, there’s an opportunity to think about what tennis is supposed to be. We’ve kind of seen with the ATP and how they’re trying to change the coverage of the sport with their “strategic plan” and we’re going to see how that plays out…” Carayol sounds unconvinced here that the ATP in particular have the right idea of how they’re planning on developing and improving in the future but he seems willing to wait to see the results before judging.
In the meantime, he’s hoping for a broader overall focus on those people that are rarely in the spotlight currently. He’d like to see tennis become “more sustainable for players not only in the top 100 but outside the top 100.” Despite much of his current career being spent covering the top players at the top events, Carayol is all for greater coverage away from those lofty heights and he clearly believes in the rarely publicized depth of talent that runs all the way down and throughout the world rankings. Those playing in the shadows deserve some time to shine.
*****
What does covering one of the major tournaments look like? How are Carayol’s days structured when he’s on site? “Well, first of all, it’s very long,” he jokes. “It’s really about just multitasking when the matches start. There’s the calm of the first hour or so, especially in the earlier rounds, but then there’s press conferences and so you’re going to press conferences. You obtain interviews by requesting the players you want to speak to and so you might have an interview with someone like a coach somewhere around the grounds but also you’re keeping an eye on the tennis and also keeping an eye on the clock because depending on the time zone, with newspapers, there’s different deadlines and so I have to make sure that what I’m supposed to be writing, that I’m going to give myself enough time to do that.” He talks this through quickly, reeling it out for us as certain memories come to him. It all sounds stressful but Carayol smiles constantly as he speaks. He loves this.
Carayol takes some time to address one of the most widely spread negative comments in relation to how tennis journalists go about their jobs, that they’re rarely at the matches themselves and often seem to be underprepared for certain press conferences. “It’s funny because when I was younger, one of the criticisms that I always saw tennis journalists get is that ‘oh, they’re never going to the matches, they’re always in the press rooms’ and it’s funny now that I realize there’s so much going on, it can be hard to actually do that.”
Through all of this, Carayol is well aware of just how lucky he is. He describes it as a “privilege” to be able to be at these big time events, to be able to talk with these players, to be able to cover this sport. He may still be in the early stages of his career but he’s already taking nothing for granted.
*****
Carayol’s description of the job paints a picture of a chaotic whirl rather than a glamorous stroll through a tournament, and with tennis being a global sport spanning the entire calendar, it’s easy to see the demands of the profession. Carayol has learned to multitask at tournaments to cover ground more quickly. “I always try to go and watch matches in person and also just bring my laptop with me and if I’m covering a match, write the piece on the court. But there’s a lot going on.”
His dedication is more than a match for the job. “The longest day I had at a Slam was actually Andy Murray’s faux retirement ceremony in 2019,” he says. Carayol was on site at the Australian Open, writing a piece on the end of Murray’s career and the attritional state of tennis for The Ringer. “Because of the weird time difference, I ended up finishing the piece at 8, 9 a.m. I was at the tournament in the press room the whole time from about 11 a.m. until almost 8:30 a.m. the next day,” he recalls.
“The cleaners were coming in and cleaning under my legs.”
Disclaimer: John Isner is a fantastic tennis player and in their own way, his marathons at Wimbledon were extremely impressive. This piece is purely satirical.
Today, Tennis Twitter was abuzz with the news that the four Grand Slam events had decided to homogenize their formats: in the case of a 6-6 deciding set, the match will be decided by a super-tiebreak, first to ten points. I’m not here to tell you whether to be happy or sad about this. I’m just here to tell you who is to blame for these developments, and that is one man: John Robert Isner.
Isner smiles with relief after beating Mahut 70-68 (SEVENTY TO SIXTY-EIGHT!) in the fifth set of the first round of Wimbledon, 2010. Screenshot: Wimbledon
Behind these pearly-white teeth lies a wicked soul. Isner has one of the greatest serves in the history of tennis and isn’t the best at breaking serve. This is a deadly-boring combination. Wimbledon, as you may know, required one player to win a deciding set by two games for quite a while. You could get a 9-7 fifth set, like the brilliant Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final in 2008. But you could also get an eternally long deciding set under the wrong circumstances.
If a player could hold serve indefinitely and fail to break serve indefinitely, the match could go on for hours too long: back, forth, back, forth, ace, ace, ace, nothing to see (or be interested by) here.
John Isner not only found himself part of those wrong circumstances multiple times, he created them like an evil tennis god hell-bent on boring spectators to death.
A moment of seriousness: I don’t fault Isner for playing this way, I really don’t. There’s only so much you can do when you’re six-ten. He has honed his serve into what many consider the biggest weapon in tennis, and it’s ridiculously hard to return serve well at such a height. He’s maximized the options available to him and has had a very good career.
With that said, Isner played a match against Nicolas Mahut at the 2010 Wimbledon that stretched to 70-68 in the fifth set.
It lasted three days.
THREE DAYS.
The worst part was that whoever advanced, leaving behind the bloody and bored corpse of their opponent, was obviously screwed for the second round match. Part of the tournament had to be put on hold for a match that was going to produce a doomed winner. Isner said as much — he was physically destroyed after edging out Mahut and hit zero aces in his second-rounder, which he lost 6-0, 6-3, 6-2.
He did get a moment of elation from the match, which he shared with every tennis fan on the planet, because they were all so damn glad the match was over.
Legend has it that Isner’s legs, too long to be contained by the picture frame, pierced the sky that day. Screenshot: Wimbledon
Isner is a vengeful god, and decided that the 70-68 marathon was insufficient punishment for tennis fans. In 2018, he made it all the way to the Wimbledon semifinals. He played Kevin Anderson. Viewers around the world sighed and threw tantrums, because they knew what was coming. We all knew what was coming.
A tiebreak. Then another one. Then ANOTHER one. The fifth set went to 6-all, but we were without our deadlock-breaking sanctuary, instead launched into a purgatory of aces and tired legs and shanked returns. Isner lost this match, but Anderson was so shattered from his 26-24 fifth set victory that he could barely move against Djokovic in the final. Jacob Steinberg of the Guardian liveblogged the final and had to field emails accusing him of bias against Djokovic since he couldn’t stop observing the disastrous quality of the final. Just look at these screencaps.
The most notable quote here is probably “this might be the worst final I’ve ever seen. Call it off.” Isner was out of the tournament, but as Steinberg discovered, chaos gods have power from beyond the grave.
Never mind that Isner has only played two insanely long matches at Wimbledon and that no other match at Wimbledon since 70-68-gate has even required a player to win as many 20 games in a deciding set, we decided that these matches were sufficient evidence to warrant a rule change, dammit. 2019 saw the introduction of a tiebreak at 12-all, even though Roland-Garros was the only other major with extended deciding sets. Despite there being only one match in the 2019 tournament that went to 12-all (the men’s final), that was apparently too much as well.
The majors tried to claim that the decision was made in the name of consistency, which would improve fan and player experience. I see through their façade, though. This was done in the name of John Isner. If not for him, would any of this have happened? His archetype — being great at holding serve and terrible at breaking serve — was so boring and/or physically taxing that the powers that be literally decided they had to change the rules to kill the possibility of further matches like 70-68 or 26-24. Those two matches had such disastrous ramifications that the remote possibility of another one taking place ended up being a non-factor.
From the 67-66 changeover during the 2010 Mahut match. Screenshot: Wimbledon
So in the end, Isner has managed to force his legacy on the tennis world even before he retires. His style of play was so intensely destructive that it broke the very fabric of the rulebook of the game.
Heat is baked into the name of the Indian Wells-Miami one-two. Warmth isn’t the only challenge at the latter tournament, though — Miami presents a much more humid heat than Indian Wells. Some players have mentioned that the balls can fly on them at Indian Wells, and the conditions have resulted in several upsets over the years. What impact does the air have on the speed and flight path of the balls? Baseline Tennis has the answers.
You might have heard of him, but by the end of this piece I hope you really (please applaud me for not impersonating BG and using Reilly instead of really) start to take notice of him.
Here’s a list of 13 men’s tennis champions you should definitely know of (in no real order but I’m putting one name atop because some fans read into the order of lists more than others):
Novak Djokovic Pete Sampras Andre Agassi Roger Federer Ivan Lendl Jimmy Connors John McEnroe Andy Murray Rafael Nadal Bjorn Borg Stefan Edberg Boris Becker Mats Wilander
Why them? 3+ Major titles, at least on 2 different surfaces, too many other significant titles, all of them have been ranked number one in the world, 500+ match wins, top 30 for all time titles, etc. These guys are for all practical purposes the cream of the crop to have ever played the game on the men’s side.
This isn’t about which of them is the greatest, this is more about how greatness looks before it punches us in the face and demands that we acknowledge it. It’s easy now to see these players as the greatest after all that they have achieved, but it wasn’t a guarantee for any of them that they would end where they did. Ask any of them. However, what if I told you that you could separate them from the rest of the pack within a couple of years on tour? Because you kind of can.
Look at this:
This chart shows the aggregated career win % of the 13 men I listed earlier. I did this by summing each of their individual results as a win or loss for their first 100 matches. So what you see is a constant improvement and that the average for these 13 men was a win rate of 69% (yes I rounded up because you can’t win half a match) at the end of their first 100 matches
Fun fact: McEnroe leads the pack; he had 72 wins in his first 100 matches on tour.
But these are the very best of the best, so to provide some further context, take a look again and now you can see how a great player like Juan Martín del Potro (JMDP) looked at this stage of his career:
This is a very respectable 55 wins in 100 matches, however, JMDP quite far off from the elite group after his 40th match or so. You can see the lines starting to diverge. Now that you have that context, here’s how Carlos Alcaraz (CAG) looks:
Note how Alcaraz isn’t just above the green line of greatness, he’s actually pulling farther away from it.
He’s ahead. Let me repeat that. He is ahead. As of right now he’s equal to the best performer of the lot at 61 career matches on the pro-tour, he shares the record of 42 wins in 61 matches with John McEnroe.
And if this isn’t enough, well.. game, set, and match (read it like Mohamed Lahyani is saying it).
The size of the bubble reflects the number of titles.
Even the likes of Nadal, Djokovic, Borg, Federer, McEnroe, Wilander, and Sampras had no titles to show for their efforts in their first 61 matches on tour. It’s quite normal. What’s new is someone winning 3 of them in as few matches and tournaments played. Sure, they aren’t “big titles” but there are players who have great and prolonged careers who have to wait to get to 100s of match wins in order to get a single title. Alcaraz already has 3 of them. He’s already got wins over multiple top 20 guys. He’s beaten Tsitsipas at the U.S. Open and came close to beating Berrettini (from two sets down!) in Melbourne. He’s beaten a former world number one in Andy Murray.
The only edge anyone in that elite group has over Alcaraz comes in the form of John McEnore having a better sets won/lost ratio, that’s it. Every other measure has Alcaraz in the mix or ahead.
Is it early days? Of course it is, but if you’ve watched the young Spaniard play, you know there’s a hint of something special here. He plays drop shots with the finesse of a tour veteran, he knows where his opponent is going to go with their next shot, he reads the game as well as I have ever seen any teenager read it, he’s already propelled his physique to a point where he can outhit and outlast his opponents. Endurance and power are not easy to develop together but CAG has put in the hard work and that should tell you everything about his state of mind and commitment to playing the long game. He’s not here to be a flash in the pan, he’s chasing after greatness and the sooner you recognize it, the more time you’ll get to spend watching him ascend all the way to the top of men’s tennis. I don’t know how many majors and Masters he will win but I am pretty sure that the 2020s will end up being remembered as a decade that saw the rise and dominance of Carlos Alcaraz Garfia.
A couple years ago, I ran a half marathon. I set out at a faster pace than I thought I could sustain, which felt okay for a few miles but caught up to me at around two-thirds of the way through the race. Beginning a long straightaway after finishing the 10th mile, my legs burned and my breathing was raggedly bursting from my chest. There were three miles left, enough distance that thinking about the finish line was fools’ gold. My body felt like it was melting. The most terrifying thing, though, was that I actually felt like I could last until the end of the race at my current pace. I knew it would take all of my willpower not to let my pace collapse like a half-baked pastry. I knew that I would feel even worse at the end of the race than I already did, and I started to cry a bit.
Playing Sara Sorribes Tormo, I imagine, must feel similar to this. She gets every ball back. She returns serve after serve until game point starts to feel like match point. It’s not especially hard to win a point against her, but the cumulative effect of trying to bash the ball through her smothering defense is exhausting. The worst part is that you can beat her, since almost everyone has much more firepower, and with this understanding comes the knowledge that if you don’t, it was probably because you weren’t willing to suffer enough.
Paula Badosa, the defending champion at Indian Wells, had the misfortune of playing Sorribes Tormo in the round of 32, and in the first set, Badosa suffered. She was broken in her first three service games. The rallies were expectedly long, but Sorribes Tormo was attacking more than usual, putting Badosa on the run at times. The defending champion hit a second serve ace at 4-4, 15-30 in a desperate attempt to avoid yet another brutal exchange. When she held serve after saving a break point, she pumped her fist at her box, but she looked close to tears. It was difficult, difficult tennis.
Badosa pulled out the incredible first set despite Sorribes Tormo saving three set points to get to a tiebreak (one of which with what felt like a thousand impossible volleys, another with an eternal rally that Badosa barely failed to win with an attempted backhand winner). On Badosa’s fourth set point, she forced Sorribes Tormo back with a deep backhand crosscourt, then lashed a forehand into the open deuce side. Only right that this set ends with a winner, I thought, except Sorribes Tormo ran it down and tossed up a lob that only missed by a few inches. Badosa pointed to her head in a trademark celebration, but then jabbed her head forcefully with her finger before slapping it in a kind of rapturous agony. I ran to the bathroom, then ate some chocolate ice cream coated in more chocolate. When I got back to my laptop, Badosa and Sorribes Tormo had already started the second set. They are good friends, apparently, which is odd to me since I don’t think friends are supposed to torture each other for fun.
How it feels to win that kind of set. Screenshot: WTA YouTube Channel
After the match, Badosa said “if every set is like that, I think I’m gonna die on the court.” It wasn’t, and she didn’t. Badosa ran away with the second set — she went for bigger, heavier shots, and Sorribes Tormo had no answer for the barrage. This isn’t easy for me to admit, since I root unabashedly for Sorribes Tormo due to her unique ability to use endurance as a weapon, but Badosa even managed to tire her opponent out first.
Badosa is ranked 7th in the world, currently in a minor dip from her high of #4 earlier this year. She is yet to make a semifinal at a major, but is by all accounts one of the best players in the world. The Indian Wells championship match last year was Badosa’s first big final, but she navigated the match like a seasoned veteran, playing the more purposeful tennis on the biggest points.
There are no technical weaknesses in the Spaniard’s game. She has been improving at a fierce rate: before 2021, she didn’t have a WTA title to her name, but ended that year as a semifinalist at the year-end finals. She has been to at least the round of 16 at every major besides the U.S. Open (and it feels like a matter of time until she makes a deep run there). At Roland-Garros last year, she was a few points away from making the semifinals. She has a penchant for being a fighter.
Naturally, defending a big title carries some pressure — maybe even more in the early rounds than the last few, given the amount of points Badosa stands to lose with an early exit. This won’t be an easy match to recover from physically, short second set notwithstanding, and her next opponent (either Leylah Fernandez or Shelby Rogers) will bring more firepower than Sorribes Tormo. Still, barring any physical issues, Badosa’s chances of winning this tournament — which hasn’t been defended by a WTA player for more than 30 years — seem as good as anyone’s.
The tennis statistics you see make up the tip of an iceberg.
You might already know this.
Big data is available to the players at a price.
But only a small fraction of this is accessible to fans like you.
You can find this small fraction usually in the Hawkeye analytics sections of the few tournament websites that offer it, 3 clicks away from the homepage—which might as well be 3 parsecs for the average tennis fan, who is not the most fastidious species in the sporting world.
But even if you could access the secret datasets that—possibly—contain all the ball trajectories of all the shots and all the steps taken by each player in every professional match, there are still secrets of the game that are impossible to understand without watching the tennis live.
Even a picture of the whole iceberg… is not the iceberg itself.
The statistics can hint at things that happen in the world of tennis, but they’re not the tennis itself.
Reducing the real-time action of racquet swishes and shoe-sole screeches and mood-altering grunts—reducing all that tennis into numbers, while occasionally necessary to babysit us into tennis’s system of meaning, can be one of the worst things to happen to the narrative surrounding the sport.
Especially when it’s used as a gateway drug for the sport’s new fans, urging us up short dopamine peaks to airily trophy-clutch our favorite player’s statistics over the rival fandoms below… while hidden in shadow are the far more important things we don’t know about our player.
We don’t know our favourite player.
I could bet most of you don’t know what racquet s/he uses.
*****
If your life’s worth of tennis-viewing reached, say, 300 minutes in total, you would have heard commentators hook the casual viewer with this “insight”:
The best tennis players are mentally stronger.
Why that term, Mister Commentator?
Perhaps, because it cloaks these talented pedants in a kind of Jedi-mind-trick mysticism, a way to sell the sport to the casual viewer—as if they could telekinetically choke their opponent from 24 metres away, or inexplicably make their attacking projectiles miss.
And it’s easy for the commentators to cloak tennis professionals in mystifying concepts.
In other sports, our eyes are always following a ball.
But, in tennis, after the point concludes, our eyes follow the disengaged player.
This person quietly strolls behind the baseline and scrutinizes their racquet stringbed. This person can nonchalantly splay 3 balls into a triangle with just one hand and then discard the ball whose green facial hair and skin seem to be unsexy, unworthy. This person is generally sexy: a powerful lower body, a lithe upper body, and toned legs to look at.
This person is, for the most part, inscrutable.
It’s easy to create mystery around this person.
This person might be mentally stronger.
This person might exert will over the weaker person on the other side of the net and puppet them into doing things they don’t want to do.
Seasoned fans will sigh at this point.
Because we know “mentally stronger” is an autopilot response that commentators fall into—insider doublespeak of the short-attention-span era that sidesteps the far more pertinent and hard-to-explain truth: the best tennis players are… better.
These perpetrators of mysticism deliberately don’t mention the best tennis players’ very physical, technical strengths that make them better.
Because these technical strengths are mindbogglingly complex in a mindbogglingly simple way.
These strengths will take an annoying, 15-minute-long article on Popcorn Tennis to explain, and the time-strapped commentator understandably will have nothing to do with belabouring the point, even though they already know the truth.
However, when you actually look into the truth, and you see what separates the best tennis players from the good tennis players, you see that the commentators’ mystifying narrative might have a point.
What the best tennis players do does in fact seem a lot like a Jedi’s—or Sith’s?—modus operandi.
The opponent does choke. The opponent’s projectiles do miss.
Why hide a good story?
*****
All the players you see on TV are talented.
The talents they possess live in the whole, wide world of less than a second.
That less than a second is what the opponent has to adapt to.
The opponent learns the language of the player’s talent—the various tennis strokes—and interprets what stroke might come next, and where to hit to, in the hope that it upsets the player’s balance.
But the star players we talk about just have a few more talents that they can stuff into that world of half a second, layers of tennis syllables and intonations to confuse the opponent as a Jedi/Sith might do to a weaker mind.
As the opponent is learning the star player’s far more nuanced tennis language, they cannot keep up, and its semantics overload them, creating a deer-in-headlights situation—or just a wrongfooted mess (see below).
Interpretation of the next move, when these star players are in the mood, is almost impossible, because they have so many options within that scintilla of time.
Guessing is often a fool’s errand.
It only takes a subtle twitch at the end of their stroke—a twitch with decades of muscle memory invested into it over a career—to “spread the play” as they see fit.
When honed inside an elite talent, like Nadal’s forehand, they can hit spot after spot at each extreme of the court.
It’s undefendable.
It overwhelms the opponent’s mind-muscle connection.
It’s what separates the good from the great.
Let’s start.
Matteo Berrettini is great.
He is the only active, under-30 male player to reach the quarterfinals of all 4 slams; only 31 male players have achieved this since 1990.
He simplifies tennis into serve+forehand rudiments so often, you barely have time to see why he’s so talented.
His talent in tennis is to reduce the tennis being played.
He is of the mold of other elite tennis-reducers like Juan Martín del Potro, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, and the best reducer of them all, Roger Federer.
Matteo Berrettini has the best combination of serve+forehand in the world right now. His forehand particularly beats opponents with an unfair combination of pace and spin, even if they are positioned near where he hits the ball, as Nadal was in this frame. It takes less than a second for his forehand stroke mechanics to create that almighty thwack.
This Tottering and Leaning Tower of Italy (uncanny foundations for a tennis player, his calf muscles) may not be the most mobile of the great players, but his two strengths are extremely versatile: his forehand and his serve.
His forehand stroke is a blink-and-you-miss-it arc, a loose-armed whip cutting the air with ease so that the ball is sent at a destructive 60 revolutions per second to any corner of the court he so chooses, dipping down in time for the baseline due to the immense, downward Magnus Effect on it. This effect multiplies the number of spots on a court he can hit to, powerfully.
His first serve, coming down from his basketball-player-sized levers, is the best of the ‘Small 4’ subgroup of NextGen players (Zverev, Medvedev, Tsitsipas, and himself), regularly hitting his spots at 120+mph. His 2nd serve is not a weakness as it is for them. The effect of his height and his smooth serving motion also multiples the number of spots he can hit to, powerfully.
There has been a lot of debate over what exactly talent is in tennis, and, in my opinion, the ability to hit a variety of spots with regularity is what talent is—it’s not the flicks and the volleys and the soft parts of tennis, even though those are nice to have. It’s the must-haves that have to be quantified as being more valuable to the sport and its mind games.
The regularity of Berrettini’s variety sticks in the opponent’s mind with sinister influence in a way that statistics can’t really show.
So the opponent steps back and increases the thickness of the wall of air between him and Berrettini’s monstrous strengths, hoping it will slow down all that ballpower in time—and this allows Berrettini more space to work with…
… and the soft skill arrives, the dropshot.
But it is a direct result of his far more valuable hard-hitting skill: his serve and forehand.
The superior technical range of his serve and forehand creates a giant sphere of influence that the opponent cannot help but notice, and this allows other parts of his game to use up that sphere with little resistance. Nadal’s body was stuck 3 metres behind the baseline because his mind told him that he needed more time to defend Berrettini’s next shot which could easily have been a 90mph forehand at either side of the court.
As in the Nadal-Djokovic point, the technical range of the player confuses and/or freezes the opponent in time.
Nadal hits an inside-out forehand with a sickening combination of power and precision to pull Djokovic right, then a crosscourt forehand to pull Djokovic left, at which point Djokovic’s mind is rankling with Nadal’s ability to hit it to both sides: Where does Nadal go next? He can go at both sides because I’ve just seen him go at both sides.I have absolutely no idea.
When Djokovic’s body reflexively chooses to anticipate a Nadal inside-out forehand on the next shot, it loses its balance.
Because Nadal chooses to go crosscourt again, hitting a wicked spot near the junction of service box and sideline, a spot in an area he’s utilized better than any human has in tennis history (I’m not exaggerating).
Up another level in a player’s technical range, we look at the value of footspeed, and how that increases the sphere of influence.
If talent is the ability to hit to a variety of spots with regularity, then wouldn’t it be greater if the player can also do all that at a higher speed, at a higher tempo?
What happens when you marry Berrettini’s strength to… more urgency?
You get someone like Iga Świątek.
Like Berrettini, she has a loose-armed whip of a forehand that can do immense damage no matter the pace of the surface, but her well-drilled feet can get it to optimal positions quicker and, hence, take more time away from her opponent.
Aryna Sabalenka is visibly more powerful than our flying Polish goddess, so it is vital she doesn’t allow Sabalenka the time to set up those huge groundstrokes. This triple forehand combination forces Sabalenka on the backfoot in all three instances. She hits her spots with a palpable urgency—the spots are more about depth than Nadalian width, falling within a foot of the baseline each time.
Świątek is able to do this because, as she developed as a player, she lacked a 120mph serve to pamper herself with 2-shot rudiments in the way Berrettini has. She had to force herself to create more consistency off the forehand. She’s a rhythmic player who can hit multiple balls near lines at a higher tempo.
While he lumbers up to a ball and delivers attacks in a slower, more powerful punch, she’s a volume-puncher, able to hit a quick succession of semi-powerful shots, arguably more exciting to watch.
The X-factor is that she can do this even when her opponent puts her in a bad position, as Sakkari did with the initial backhand down the line.
A flurry of steps, an artful slide, a deliciously-angled crosscourt forehand to make Sakkari scamper more to the right, and she gains the advantage in the point. She would have been on the back foot in the next two shots if not for that bit of kinesthetic skill.
Superior movement entails you can hit from a greater variety of spots as well. And this plays havoc in the opponent’s mind; you only need to watch her winning match point vs. Kanepi in the 2022 Australian Open quarterfinal (too long to GIF!) to understand how movement can create an unforced error statistic out of nothing.
That’s what commentators mean when they say a player “shrinks the court”—the giant sphere of influence Świątek exerts on her opponent’s mind not only includes the massive area on the opponent’s side of the court created by her versatile forehand attack, but the massive area her legs can cover on her own side of the court, shrinking the opponent’s options in attack.
Lumbering, tottering Berrettini is scary to defend against, but a joy to attack against.
Świątek is scary on both counts.
A player’s sphere of influence is what gets lost in the “mental strength” doublespeak of the commentators.
This sphere is directly proportional to a player’s technical range—their arsenal of talents.
It’s like if you lived near the wetlands of South Asia, you would understand the sphere of influence of a saltwater crocodile; it travels at three times the speed of Phelps, so you’d stay out of the water for the most part. But you wouldn’t care about it on land.
Whereas, somewhere in Africa, a hippo’s greater “talents” make it a problem both in the water and on land.
The time structure of being living prey dwindles as the weapons of the predator increase. Your proprioceptive reflexes know what can end you, and if you do end up between Scylla and Charybdis, between Świątek’s destructive forehand side and her equally unattackable backhand slide, your conviction dies in that split second, and you do something stupid—you make an error off a sitter, as Kanepi did.
The best players make you look clumsy.
This makes them look mentally stronger because anyone can look mentally stronger than an apparent klutz.
But are they mentally stronger… or just better?
There is another last factor that creates a bigger sphere of influence in tennis: the ability to change the directions of the rally frequently while having Berrettini-like power in reserve.
This means the willingness to hit the difficult down-the-line and inside-in and inside-out options off each wing, to keep your opponent off balance.
Świątek has the ability to change direction in spades, but she lacks the Berrettini-equivalent nuclear power in the women’s game—i.e. Serena Williams power—and she lacks the big serve, which is the biggest reason for her failures against the top players.
There is one top 20 player who, I feel, has pretty much all the factors I talked about here (not including the four 20-slam behemoths we’ve seen in the last two decades), and he was the initial reason I had pottered around with the idea of technical range for a tennis article.
I watched the Rio de Janeiro Open last month, when unfairly talented Spanish teenager, Carlos Alcaraz, who has, in the last year, humbled top 10 mainstays far above his rank, showed how the tennisness of tennis was unable to be shown in the statistics. While watching the dude over the last 3 matches of his title run, what became clear was the assurance with which he played his drop shots, a signal that his technical range was firing on all cylinders.
In the final, he had the task of defeating the darkest balrog of the clay world, the lieutenant of all suffering and evil in tennis, the torturous creature who gave Suffering’s favorite son himself, Rafael Nadal, his toughest matches in the 2018 and 2020 campaigns for the French Open:
Diego “Goliath” Schwartzman.
Goliath is 5’6” but has the skills to jump off his backhand side and hit the ball at a fairly powerful pace from shoulder/head height, and because of this he can often win the Ad exchange with Nadal’s forehand on clay (a task nigh impossible for 99.9% of the top 1000 in men’s tennis on Nadal’s bad days—and 100% on Nadal’s better days).
So, when he was trying to trap Alcaraz’s backhand in the Ad exchange, it did seem like Alcaraz might come off as second best. Don’t get me wrong: Alcaraz certainly has an above-average backhand, but he tends to rely on his forehand to get himself out of trouble, a forehand that has Berrettini-like power to end rallies in one loud syllable of finality.
Some of our Popcorn writers have also noticed that Alcaraz tends to hit one too many forehands from his backhand corner, sacrificing positional balance, and while I agree with that advice on hardcourt, I don’t think that’s necessarily bad on clay (forehands have time to create more loop and spin on clay, which push the opponent back; anyway I’m digressing!).
As you can see, Alcaraz soaked up Diego’s targeted pressure at his backhand, and created two crucial inside-out backhands at two crucial points of that crucial first set. The ability to suddenly change the direction of the rally off what is considered a more difficult shot is what planted in Diego’s mind the belief that Alcaraz could and would do it again.
With the idea that Alcaraz can hit the backhand with solid depth crosscourt and inside-out,/down-the-line, Diego felt like he had to stay back to defend both possibilities, leaving Alcaraz the opening for the soft skill…
There needn’t be too many examples to show the range on Alcaraz’s forehand, which is already one of the best in the sport, despite its rawness.
Here’s an example of him hitting one of those “unwise” forehands from his backhand corner, the spin and power pushing Diego back into a defensive lob. Two, heavy forehands kept Diego back, opening up the space for the soft skill…
It’s a great thing that the surface was clay, where the tactical battles are always heightened, relatively unadulterated by the instinctive thwacks of the serve.
A Berrettini may dirty the sanctity of technical range with his height-boosted serve on grass or hardcourt, but on the clay is where his serve can no longer mask weaknesses. Berrettini lost to Alcaraz in the quarters of this tournament, the Spaniard targeting the Italian’s well-known backhand weakness.
Tennis in many ways is a sport of exerting uncertainty on the opponent.
It’s obviously not easy to do. It requires the honing of several talents over a decade that then have to work in perfect harmony on the big stage—during all the complications nerves bring. But once you master most of these talents, you can create a multicursal tennis language, a language that boggles for its multiple options.
A strange thing happened yesterday, which reminded me that it is far more frequent than is given credit for. Seb Korda, #38 in the world, almost beat #4 Nadal, in a rare reversal of this tennis language of risk and reward that I was elaborating out here. Korda has played and practised with Nadal a couple of times, and, in all their meetings, Korda said he lost pretty comfortably to Nadal.
Knowing that Nadal has access to patterns of tennis language he can only dream of, Korda decided to do what many less talented players do when they meet an obviously more talented player who is expected to beat them.
He decided to throw the kitchen sink at Nadal.
A tennis language of high risk and high reward—a loud and uncouth language, but also an occasionally overwhelming language.
And it worked.
Nadal seemed to be feeling the ball well in the early stages of the match, but as Korda persisted with this berserking gameplan, the GOAT’s conviction palpably fell, and a stream of inexplicable errors flew off his racquet. A group of Nadal fans and myself discussed the issue, and most of them assumed this was just a poor show of form on the Spaniard’s part, but I was skeptical of this just being a Nadal problem.
In my opinion, it just seemed that the “civilized” language that respects risk, that most tennis players use on most days, was being disrespected by Korda—like, if a boorish teenager talked down a well-spoken teacher—perhaps like that scene when Gillian Anderson’s character first addresses the Moordale Secondary School in Netflix’s ‘Sex Education’.
Her expertise is undeniable, and she is a hit among the other parents in the previous week, but as soon as she makes her first appearance among the students, they can only see the unserious side of the role she fills, and ride roughshod over her.
Korda absolutely respects Nadal, but when he plays the sport in a sane, risk-aware way, he will, 99 times out of 100, lose to someone of Nadal’s calibre.
So he had to change things up.
And, as players of Korda’s good-but-not-great calibre often find themselves in, his position was of a person who had nothing to lose, and that can work to your advantage if you let it.
His 90mph rockets off both wings created a sphere of influence that had Nadal overthinking his own shots in the urgency to create angles that weren’t inside Korda’s destructive wheelhouse. Hence, Nadal’s inexplicable errors—what some commentators, on their clever days, call “forced unforced errors.”
In the end, a player with a superior technical range will win most of the shot exchanges over a match, but there are those rare days of upsets, the days when the underdog snaps, their fear flatlines into fuck-it vehemence, and a stone-cold butcher is born.
Then, the versatile player will seem like the mentally weaker mess, when really, the underdog is using their lowly status to play at a high-risk, high-reward game.
It happened in the 2009 French Open fourth round when Söderling beat Nadal, it happened in the 2009 U.S. Open final, when del Potro beat Federer, and it happened in the 2014 Australian Open quarterfinal, when Wawrinka beat Djokovic.
Don’t forget that anything can happen. Tennis is still just a sport.
Popcorn Tennis 