For all the work Andy Roddick has put into his game—the tweaking, tinkering, re-inventing, and rounding out—one towering reality has always been a constant. When Andy Roddick can break serve, his destiny is in his hands almost all the time. That's because on all but the slowest of surfaces, his serve is deadly and his approach to hold games generally sound.
But today at the O2 Arena, Rafael Nadal deftly and successfully challenged that reality despite falling behind by a set and a break. He came away a winner, 3-6, 7-6 (5), 6-4, recovering from a significant deficit to win his first set and first match at the ATP World Tour Finals in London. Last year, the first the tournament was held in England, he was comprehensively shut out, failing to win even a set in his three matches.
At the outset today, it looked like Nadal was in deep trouble. He played tentatively and hit two double-faults in one game to go down 0-2. In the very next game, Roddick threw in a 141 MPH serve, and it looked as if Nadal might be in for a quick day. Serving at 0-3, Nadal had to fight through a couple of deuce games to make his first hold. Still, Roddick did what he does best—he held onto that single break and served out the set. Ironically, his first-serve conversion percentage was lowest in the first set (51 percent, as opposed to to 68 and an impressive 71 percent in the next two sets, respectively).
This tells you, among other things, that even when he's serving well, Roddick has his work cut out against the very best players, and that Nadal's service return is excellent. And once Nadal gets the ball back in play, all bets are off. Not too many players are going to slug it out from the baseline successfully against Rafa.
To his credit, Roddick didn't even attempt to do that. Not only did he serve and volley, he ran kamakaze missions, rushing the net behind second serves. He also challenged Nadal to try and sneak aces past him by showing the Spaniard a lot of forehand court—essentially daring him to go there. These were all ploys to keep Nadal off balance, and in the big picture, they were effective. Remember how Nadal raved about his new serve at the U.S. Open? It failed to make the trip to London.
Still, Nadal is Nadal. He scraped and fought and kept pushing Roddick back off the baseline, and his general consistency, grit and ability to come up with the right response to any probing question under the most stressful of situations paid off. Nadal knows how to survive perilous times.
The second-set tiebreaker turned the tide of the match. Nadal earned an early mini-break, but before Larry Stefanki could mutter "Uh-oh," Roddick recouped it, and then he went up by a mini-break of his own. But before Stefanki could exclaim, "Oh, yeah," Nadal snatched it right back. In the heart of the tiebreaker, the men failed to hold for four consecutive points. And when Roddick's serve is broken, either in a mini-break or a conventional one, he's in trouble. Roddick fought off two set points from 6-3, but Nadal converted the third, and you could almost see Roddick's chances evaporate once Nadal forced a final set.
—Pete Bodo