The conversation about winning and losing tennis matches begins with the second serve. Dominic Thiem outlasted Pablo Carreno Busta 6-3, 3-6, 6-4 at the Nitto ATP Finals Wednesday evening with this key battleground being the crucible of the final outcome. The first serve always reigns supreme in our sport, delivering a healthy win percentage because of its power, freedom, and accuracy. But as soon as it’s missed, the gateway to breaking serve becomes illuminated. The first serve is essentially a red light to collecting return points. The second serve is as green as it gets. At 4-4, 15/15 in the third set, as the match clock ticked over to two hours on the dot, Carreno Busta chased a first serve...
Roger Federer has strategically gone back to the slice. Federer defeated Alexander Zverev 7-6(6), 5-7, 6-1 to be the first player to advance to the semi-final stage of the Nitto ATP Finals after a masterful performance at The O2 on Tuesday night. If you caught just one sentence of his post-match press conference, all you needed to hear was this: “I think I was able to stay the course and use my slice quite effectively, then try with variation and go into his forehand,” Federer said. Federer is back to hitting a lot more slice returns and slice backhands in London because the court conditions and the opponent simply dictate it. Federer Returns The Federer renaissance in 2017 has been...
What you want to do is quite often in direct conflict with what you need to do. Dominic Thiem wanted to step back as far as possible returning second serves against Grigor Dimitrov to buy time to take big cuts at the ball. After all, it’s what helped get him to London in the first place. But there was only one problem: It didn’t work nearly as well on the quicker, lower-bouncing indoor conditions of The O2. Dimitrov defeated Thiem 6-3, 5-7, 7-5 in their Group Pete Sampras match at the Nitto ATP Finals on Monday, with the battleground of second serves as important as anything that transpired in the match. Overall, Thiem won 23 per cent (12/52) of points...
Hit them before they can hit you. The match lasted an hour and a half, but Roger Federer was well on his way to winning it before a ball had been struck. Federer defeated Jack Sock 6-4, 7-6(4) in their opening round match at the Nitto ATP Finals on Sunday in no small part to winning the toss and electing to receive. The decision went against Federer’s normal front-running tactics of serving first and letting his opponent chase him. This time around, Federer was on the hunt to immediately break and instantly unsettle his American opponent. Six points later, his goal was accomplished and Sock played the rest of the match in Federer’s rear-view mirror. Federer’s early strategy of playing...
Upgrade, double and freeze. Jack Sock successfully tapped into the three main benefits of hitting a run-around forehand instead of a backhand from the baseline in the Ad court to defeat Filip Krajinovic 5-7, 6-4, 6-1 in the final of the Rolex Paris Masters on Sunday. Sock relentlessly hunted forehands in the Ad court as his Serbian opponent pummeled that side of the court trying to give Sock a steady diet of backhands. Overall for the match, Sock hit 132 groundstrokes (62%) standing in the Ad court, and just 81 (38%) in the Deuce court. The following breakdown illustrates the American's thirst for the more lethal run-around forehand when standing in the Ad court. Court Position & Stroke - Where...
