Big points and momentum, that’s what drives tennis, we hear. The player who wins the former, gets the latter. You won’t see many matches that make this point more clearly than Roger Federer’s 6-2, 2-6, 6-4 win over Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in London on Sunday.
For 40 minutes, it didn’t look there would be any big points at all in this one. Until 1-1 in the second set, Federer had all of the momentum to himself. In what has become a pattern in their matches this year, the Frenchman began flat as a crepe (or flat as a flat crepe, anyway). He was broken at love at 1-2 on two forehand errors, and he mounted no challenge to Federer’s serve—off-balance throughout the set, he could barely get a return in play, or get a ball to come off his strings cleanly. He finished with a second dismal, half-hearted break at love.
Tsonga, frozen for the first set, finally started to talk to himself at the start of the second—in this case, it was a good sign. Returning at 2-1, he concentrated on putting a few of Federer’s serves back in play, and it paid dividends. From 30-30 in that game, Federer, who hadn’t been remotely tested on the day, flipped two makeable down the line forehands wide and was broken. The match had turned 180 degrees. It wasn’t long before Tsonga—rocking back for first serves and pasting forehand returns, had earned his own 6-2 set.
The first game of the third set marked another, more subtle shift. Federer came out energized and moving more aggressively on his serve and fired a confidence-boosting ace for 30-0. The match hadn’t turned all the way back around, but Federer had regained the initiative. Cruising on serve, and beginning to find his range again on his return, he forced Tsonga to hold off a break point at 2-3. The match finally turned for good when Tsonga, facing the pressure of holding to stay in the match at 4-5, smacked an easy backhand volley into the net and double-faulted for 0-30. This time Federer had his best shot ready on a big point. He knocked Tsonga back with a forehand return and finished the point with a forehand approach curled perfectly for an inside-in winner. Two points later, Federer was 1-0 in Group B; Tsonga, despite his comeback from the depths, was 0-1.
As far as Tsonga’s game goes, the end was a disappointment, but the start even more so. After going down 0-5 in the first to Federer in Paris eight days ago and down two sets to him at Wimbledon, he might have been guarding against a similar opening here. But it happened all over again today. Tsonga, I suppose, will always struggle to find a happy medium for his game. He began slowly, but by the final game he had gone all the way over to the other side, overcooking volleys and taking silly risks on his serve. He’ll need to curb those two extremes if he’s going to advance to the semis.
As far as Federer’s game, he used the wide and body serves in the deuce court well, as well the kicker wide in the ad court—he was thoughtful, rather than powerful, with his serve. He pressed with his forehand well at the start, but overdid four in a row in the early stages of the second set. He missed with his backhand return—it will never be a good matchup against Tsonga’s serve—but flicked a couple of vintage passes from bad positions on that side, and ended the match with another. He pushed Tsonga back early, but was in turn pushed back on his backhand and run side to side in the second set. Most important, where Federer has faded away in a flurry of errors against hot-handed opponents on a number of occasions this year, this time he righted himself at the start of the third and used his service variety to keep his opponent off-balance and his nose ahead—you have to think his ability to hold it together in the second set against Tsonga in Paris helped give him more confidence to do the same today. If a quicker court doesn’t necessarily mean more serve and volley—Federer did very little of it today—it does make the serve itself even more paramount.
I wrote before the tournament that Federer would need to find a way past the inevitable shaky patches in London, but that if he beat Tsonga, the tournament was “his to lose.” He did the first today, and while this wasn’t a full-flight Federer, it was a resourceful Federer. He’s in the lead for now, and he’s been a pretty fair front-runner in the past.
—Steve Tignor