For those of us who love the game more than any of its particular players, what keeps us coming back to tennis is the quality of its matches. Rather than charming personalities or beautiful strokes, what counts most is the seesaw suspense of a great duel.
With that in mind, I’m going to finish 2010 by spending the two weeks until Christmas counting down the 10 best matches of the season. Compared to 2009, it was not a banner year for classic encounters; but then, few are when compared to '09. The third-best match of last season, Rafael Nadal’s death-in-the-afternoon win over Novak Djokovic in Madrid, would easily top the list this time around. But what seemed like a desert at first glance has yielded up a few forgotten oases of excitement. Today I’ll start with No. 10, as shown in the two long sets of highlights above: Roger Federer’s 5-7, 4-6, 6-4, 7-6 (1), 6-0 win over Alejandro Falla in the first round at Wimbledon.
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What’s the toughest thing about predicting upsets in tennis? They’re so . . . unpredictable. The ones you point to as somewhat plausible end up fizzling, while the ones you’re sure could never possibly happen suddenly do happen. Federer-Falla fell somewhere in between, and, as is always the case, it was much easier to see in hindsight. Federer had won all four matches and 11 sets that they’d played, but Falla had gotten into a groove against him in the previous month. They’d met at both the French Open and in the Wimbledon tune-up in Halle. You can see from the start he was very comfortable standing toe to toe with Federer from the baseline.
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Is there another sport in which location counts for as much as it does in tennis? From the sound of the first ball hit in Centre Court, you know you couldn’t be anywhere else. The pop at contact is fuller—rounder—than it is anywhere else. The arena’s overhanging roof produces a unique set of acoustics.
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One thing this match clearly illustrates is the disruptive effect that even a journeyman lefty can have on a match. Simply by swinging his hook serve to Federer’s backhand in the ad court, Falla begins the point with an advantage. And while he can’t do that in the deuce court, he can slide the ball away from Federer’s weaker side, his one-handed backhand. It seemed like a bigger advantage than normal on this day, when the court was green and slick. It feels like Federer is laboring to return the ball on the ad side, and the crosscourt backhand is always open for Falla.
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Falla is a peculiar and deceptive stroke-maker. He takes little backswing on either side, but he gets the ball to shoot through the court with pace. His power is generated right around the contact point. For his opponents, the ball must get on top of you a little more quickly than it does with most other opponents. You can see that even as he’s falling (falla-ing) behind, Federer doesn’t have a lot of options. He’s stuck picking up a lot of deep, low-trajectory shots and can’t, as Darren Cahill says, “get ahead” in rallies by moving Falla out of the center of the court.
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Falla’s most impressive moment comes at set point in the second set. He gets Federer on the run, but it appears that Federer may get out of it when he flicks up a towering lob that pushes Falla backward. Rather than try to end the point, which is always the default option when you’re nervous, Falla reaches up and hits an overhead safely into the middle of the court and starts the point over. Then he wins it.
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And then, two sets later, he blows it. Heartbreakingly. The second thing this match shows is the cruelty of tennis' scoring system. When a lower-ranked player attempts to serve out a match at 5-4, it’s almost as if, no matter how well he’s played, he’s nothing more than dead even with his opponent. If he wins this game, good enough, it’s over; if he loses it, though, it might just be over for him. Especially in this situation, when Federer, despite being down a break, had finally begun to open up the points from the baseline.
Credit Federer for playing it smart at the most crucial moment. At break point, he uses some nasty slice backhands to keep Falla at bay, and then surprises him by coming over a backhand and knocking it, in vintage Federer live-on-the-edge style, a couple inches in front of the baseline. It looks like a body blow to Falla, and it leads to an even bigger forehand—a haymaker after the body blow—on the next shot. The match is over. It's show-off time for Federer in the fifth.
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The appeal of this match was not in its quality—even though it was generally high—but in its suspense. How long could Falla hold a lead, how long could he defy the expected? It kept you riveted. The match also illustrated just how remarkable it is that this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often in the early rounds to a guy like Federer. After a match like this, you’ll hear a dozen people wondering, “What’s wrong with Roger Federer? How could he possibly let what's-his-name take two sets from him? He must not have been concentrating, or he must have taken the guy lightly, or he must be looking ahead in the draw, or he must be bored, or he must not be what he used to be.” None of those things will have been close to being true. What is true is that tennis matches by nature can go either way. What we take for granted about the best players is how infrequently they let them go the wrong way.