What Stefanos Tsitsipas did to Roger that Federer usually does to foes

If you were like me, you didn’t think that Stefanos Tsitsipas was going to beat Roger Federer until Federer’s final backhand pass landed in the net. Yes, Tsitsipas was up two sets to one and 6-5 in the fourth-set tiebreaker. And yes, he had saved all 12 break points and answered every Federer foray for the previous three hours and 44 minutes. But we had seen Federer wriggle his way out of similar jams too many times before—most famously in the last two Australian Open finals—to believe he wouldn’t do it again, especially against a 20-year-old opponent.

But, as we found out over and over and over again last night, this wasn’t just any 20-year-old opponent. What did Tsitsipas do differently against Federer that so many others haven’t? He did what every up-and-comer should do: He took a few ideas from the Maestro’s handbook, and made them his own. Once upon a time, we called Grigor Dimitrov Baby Fed, but Tsitsipas showed us tonight what part of Federer’s game Dimitrov couldn’t mimic: His instincts. It’s Tsitsipas who has them.

Here are five ways he turned the traditional tables on Federer.

Normally, during a Federer match, we hear from the commentators about how Federer is trying to “figure out” the other guy, and all the ways he’s trying to take him out of his game. We typically don’t hear anything like that about his opponent, who is just assumed to have no other options that to stick to his comparatively limited style. I realized that dynamic had been flipped on its head when, in the middle of the first set, Tsitsipas took a couple of steps back on a Federer second serve, and tried a completely different type of return, a high looping backhand, from any he had tried before. It was clear that Tsitsipas was going to act, rather than just react, during this match.

The story of the match was Tsitsipas’s willingness to come to net. He went there 68 times, and in his post-match interview John McEnroe praised him for keeping the all-court game alive. But it wasn’t just the number of times he rushed the net that matter; it was how and when he did it. Whenever he was in trouble, he forced the issue—on many of the 12 break points he saved, on one of the four set points he saved in the second set, and on his lone match point.

Like Federer, Tsitsipas didn’t just use his forehand to go for outright winners; he used it to set up his net forays. He didn’t bring back serve-and-volley, but he did continue the more recent tradition of forehand-and-volley. There’s an old-fashioned inter-connectedness to Tsitsipas’ game that reminds me not just of Federer’s, but of an Aussie great like Ken Rosewall’s—everything is about putting him in a better position for the next shot, and moving him forward. We know Federer doesn’t like to back up behind the baseline; now we know Tsitsipas doesn’t like to do it either, and he’s just as skilled at holding his ground.

We’ve been told that you can’t win by coming to the net anymore, so much so that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If players don’t believe they can do something, they’re probably not going to be able to do it. So it’s always amazing to see that it can work, with the right shots, the right skills, and, most of all, the right, ultra-persistent attitude. Even when Tsitsipas lost a point at net, there was no question that he was going to keep going there. After a while, that pressure of having to come up with a pass wore on Federer. By the third set, even Tsitsipas’s most ordinary approaches were good enough to elicit errors from Federer, especially from his backhand side. Pressure is a privilege, Billie Jean King said. It’s also a killer.

In the process, Tsitsipas gave us an example of how a one-handed backhand can work today. Like Federer, but unlike, say, Dominic Thiem, Tsitsipas didn’t try to rally and grind with his one-hander; that generally leaves a one-handed player at a disadvantage against a two-hander. Instead, Tsitsipas used his one-hander to open the court and change the pace, while always attacking with his forehand.

Most of today’s players, and thus most of Federer’s opponents, play at one speed. They belt the ball from the baseline from both sides, so you pretty much know what’s coming. That has always given Federer, with his one-handed backhand and his ability to change speeds, spins and trajectories, an advantage—opponents have to guess what he’s going to do next.

Against Tsitsipas, Federer also had to guess, because Tsitsipas has multiple options, too. He can use a short chip backhand or roll over it; he can suddenly rush the net from anywhere; most important, he has multiple gears on his forehand. He has the loopy rally ball, but when he needs to, he can flatten it out and belt it into either corner for a winner. Federer looked a step slow for much of this match; part of that, I think, was that he couldn’t predict what Tsitsipas was going to do next.

As much as anything else, it’s Federer’s serve—more specifically, his unique ability to come up with winning serves on big points—that has kept him at the top of the sport for so long. Last night, Tsitsipas was the one who threw down the bombs when he needed them. And like Federer, when he missed a first serve on an important point, he came up with something special and surprising on the second ball.

The image I think I’ll remember most from this match was Tsitsipas, at the start of the fourth-set tiebreaker, pacing at the back of the court and verbally urging himself on. It was a way of working off his nervous energy, rather than letting it build. He knew, like the rest of us, that this was the moment when Federer was supposed to beat him to the punch and steal the match from him. Rather than wait to see what the Maestro had in store for him, he beat him there first.

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