Roger Federer 3.0 by Dr. Don Brosseau

Written by: Tennischiro on 20th January 2014

Roger Federer 3.0 by Dr. Don Brosseau

epa04036282 Roger Federer of Switzerland returns the ball to Andy Murray of Britain during their quarter final match of the Australian Open Grand Slam tennis tournament in Melbourne, Australia, 22 January 2014. Federer won the match. EPA/NARENDRA SHRESTHA |

Editors note: Don lives in Los Angeles. He is world famous for possessing one of the deepest minds in the game. For over 20 years Don was the tourney director for the famous and prestigious “Huggy Bear ” fundraising event in “The Hamptons “. He watched this match in the middle of the night. Hopefully this explains his beginning. Which he basically started as he was watching the last two sets.

At 2-3 in the third set, Mats Wilander commented on EuroSport on Federer’s aggressiveness forcing Murray to start going forward himself: “…and suddenly we are looking at a completely different style of tennis, … and how healthy would that be?”

However, in anticipating a change in style by the top players, Mats is overlooking the fact that hardly anyone has the necessary skills to execute these tactics. Murray is one of the few top players who has adequate front court skills to go forward effectively. If Federer rediscovers his serve and volley skills, his earlier playing habits as a teenager and young pro will give him a head start to be able to showcase those skills at an elite level and approach the craftsmanship that Edberg routinely demonstrated.

To be able to execute the kind of aggression Federer was using, a number of things are necessary. First of all, you must have the weapons to create opportunities. On top of that, to do it on your opponent’s service games, you are going to need defensive skills that can adequately neutralize your opponent’s weapons. There are a number of players that have those skills.

Next, you are going to need the ability to recognize when you have created one of these opportunities as well as the speed and transition skills to actually take advantage of it. There are a lot less players, even among the best in the world, who actually have these skills anymore.

Finally, after all that, this new aggressive player needs the simple comfort level with his position at the net so that he can react instinctively to the passing shot he must now intercept and dispatch accurately and crisply to its final resting place. This is much more than simple volleying skills, these are instinctive reactions. It is almost impossible to learn those reactions after about age 16. They have to be built into the player as he develops. Otherwise, we end up with otherwise miraculously coordinated world-class athletes actually looking terribly clumsy on the tennis court (Think Agassi, Roddick or today, Djokovic).

And the final necessary piece is commitment; without commitment to this tactic, you will never get the necessary reps and experience to develop any proficiency. The second time an established player makes a clumsy volley error or gets fooled and moves the wrong way on a passing shot, he is going to want to abandon the tactic. And it is going to take a lot more than a couple of uncomfortable points before he develops any real comfort or proficiency with the tactic. That’s part of the reason it is so important to develop this tactical skill early in the development of a player, while he is still in his mid-teen years, at the latest.

Even in the match tonight, Roger was firing on all cylinders and at the end of the third set, he got just a little tentative and his movement toward the net became significantly reduced. First, it was because Murray was taking the opportunity away from him whenever he could, but then Roger became just a little tentative and he paid a bit of a price for that conservative approach. It worked out eventually, but there were a lot of break points he could not convert because he was unable to make the same moves he was making early in the match. Perhaps he recognized a little shortcoming in Andy’s movement and decided to take the conservative approach, but he wasn’t using the same devil-may-care, swashbuckling approach that characterized his play the first two and a half sets.

Nevertheless, it was great fun to see both Murray and Federer trying to work their way forward whenever possible at the beginning of the third set. I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of play from both players in quarterfinals or later of a grand slam in almost 10 years. Unfortunately, for the reasons I outlined above, we are not going to see it very often in the near future either. But we might see it from Federer again; hopefully in two days against Nadal. Djokovic is smart to bring Becker in to his camp to help him improve in this dimension; but it wasn’t smart to relegate Vajda and fail to recognize it would take months of work and many matches in practice as well as tournament play before he could afford to risk employing the tactic as a major strategy in his campaign to win any major. Federer is rediscovering a former self with Edberg; for almost all of the rest, it means creating a whole new alter ego almost from scratch. Of all the current and former top ten players, the French (Tsonga, Gasquet and Monfils especially) are probably the best equipped to incorporate this kind of play into their playbook. Most of the big guys are simply too slow; I think Janowicz could do it, but he has a lot of other problems first. Wawrinka did win a gold medal in doubles. But even a relatively young player like Dimitrov is unlikely to put up with the beating he has to take to develop the necessary reactions and comfort with that position at the net as someone tries to pass him.

I hope I’m wrong, but it’s going to take a lot more than a little faster courts and tighter knitted nap on the balls to bring back serve and volley tennis, even at the levels Federer was employing tonight. That’s a small fraction of the number of trips Rafter or even Sampras made to the net; forget about comparisons to the serve and volleyers of the 60’s and 70’s who came up on almost every second serve, at least on hard courts and grass. But it could be a great opportunity for Roger and a key component to success for the reincarnated Roger Federer 3.0. Again, I certainly hope so. It is great fun to watch!

10sChiro

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Topics: 10sballs, Andy Murray, Andy Roddick, Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Sports, Tennis, Tennis News