“There’s like 15 people in here, you can hear everything they say.” This is how Mardy Fish described playing in the main stadium in Shanghai yesterday. And it’s true, the tournament, like its sister event in Beijing, always gets off to a slow start from an audience perspective. Even Andy Roddick and Rafael Nadal played to wide swaths of empty seats in their featured evening matches. Sometimes it seems that the number of corporate logos—Rolex, Heineken, FedEx—outnumber spectators.
Today, though, there was a pretty lively atmosphere in the second stadium for a distinctly non-marquee match between Feliciano Lopez and Alex Bogomolov, Jr. Most likely the bulk of the crowd had wandered over from the main arena after Dmitry Tursunov pulled out of his match with Andy Murray, but however they got there, it was good to see them.
Juan Carlos Ferrero is the ghost of men’s tennis, a figure from its past, a might-have-been who can haunt today’s players on the right afternoon. That’s what the 31-year-old has done so far in Shanghai by hanging tough and pulling out close matches against Mikhail Youzhny and Fernando Verdasco. By the end of the third set today, Verdasco looked particularly haunted. He had gone through his usual series of poses—testy, sullen, surly, glum—and finished in exhausted resignation.
Ferrero can still do that to you. After years of wear and tear, the body and the game will never be what they once were. This season alone he missed three Grand Slams because of injuries to his wrist, knee, shoulder, and hip. And he’s filled out and slowed down too much to merit his old nickname, “The Mosquito.” But those years have also helped Ferrero’s mind. He's a calmer competitor now than he was during his peak nearly a decade ago.
Like fellow former No. 1s Lleyton Hewitt and Andy Roddick, Ferrero now looks like the state of the art from the transitional mini-era known as 2003, between Pete Sampras’s last major, at the 2002 U.S. Open, and before Roger Federer fully took flight, at the Aussie Open in 2004. JC's ground strokes and speed are no longer stunners, but it’s still fun to watch this lifer who once thought he would be a king compete against players at his level.
Commentator Jason Goodall is a man of the stock phrase. “Inch perfect,” “staring down the barrel of a gun,” and others I can’t recall right now. But what happens when you start one of your phrases and realize midway through that it doesn’t exactly apply to the situation at hand? (“Situation at hand”: Is that another?)
In the second game of the Ferrero-Verdasco match, Verdasco reached break point. Goodall seemed to think that he had already broken, so he began the line that he saves for this moment: “He’s drawn first blood.” By the time Goodall got to “blood,” though, Verdasco was lining up in the ad court to receive serve. He obviously hadn’t won the game yet. Goodall, light on his feet, amended his stock phrase just in time: “He’s drawn first blood—almost.”
Could this be a new way for commentators to let us know that a player has reached break point? It’s certainly dramatic, if a bit of a letdown at the end.
The return of serve, statistically, is the difference-maker in men's tennis today. The three ATP players currently at the top of the list for percentage of return games won are Djokovic, Nadal, and Murray; the top two players in percentage of games won on serve are the much-lower-ranked John Isner and Ivo Karlovic.
Of course, this doesn’t mean the return itself is more important than the serve; Nadal ranks highly in this category because of his excellent ground-stroke game in general. But it does show that the return can be where a match is won or lost. Watching from Shanghai this week with this in mind, I feel like the return is also the shot where the pros waste the most opportunities, because of the way the sport is currently played.
Jurgen Melzer was behind 0-4 in a third-set tiebreaker today to Santiago Giraldo. At that point, he abandoned his normal baseline game, took a second serve on the rise with his two-handed backhand, and charged in behind it. Naturally, he won the point with an easy volley, and almost came back to win the breaker. It made me wonder why more players with two-handers don’t try this seemingly natural, and formerly standard, play. They’ve got the second hand on the backhand, why not use it?
It just doesn’t go with the norm. That norm is what Jo-Wilfried Tsonga did time after time with his return against Kei Nishikori. Even when Nishikori threw in a half-paced kick, the Frenchman backed up, or ran around his backhand to bomb a forehand from behind the baseline. The leaping, open-stance, long-swing forehand that most everyone hits today just doesn’t work as well for traditional approach shots, which require shorter swings and rapid-fire timing to take the ball as it ascends.
But, as Melzer showed in a matter of seconds, the traditional approach is still as effective as ever. It’s easier on the body, too.
Speaking of Nishikori and Tsonga, the former has finally reached his goal of being ranked No. 45 or higher in the world, the highest ranking previously achieved by a Japanese player, Shuzo Matsuoka. As a fan, I like to watch Nishikori play for his uncluttered-ness. To do what he does at 5-foot-10, 150 pounds—he looks shorter than that to me—requires exemplary timing and technique, and he’s got both on his ground strokes. For better or worse, they're the most purely Bollettieri-esque shots I’ve ever seen.
As for Tsonga, this match involved the usual mix of the joyous and the perplexing (can a person be “joyously perplexing”?). No matter how many times he's gone walkabout before, it’s still frustrating to see him hit a very good drop shot, stand still on the baseline and watch his opponent track it down, then, with an easy ball in front of him, hit a lob over the other guy’s head and again stand still and watch from the baseline. And then lose the point. And the match.
Perhaps commentator Robbie Koenig summed up Tsonga best today: “He continues to go for too much, but that’s just part of his game.”
You really don’t want to turn “going for too much” into a tactic.
It doesn’t take long for fear to set in when it comes to watching Rafael Nadal these days. In the second game of his match today against Guillermo Garcia-Lopez, Nadal struggled to break serve despite various errors and donations from his opponent. After yet another Garcia-Lopez double fault, Goodall finally said, “If Nadal doesn’t break here, something’s wrong.”
Rafa didn’t break, but nothing turned out to be wrong; he won the match 6-3, 6-2. It was only a case of Nadal struggling with his one major, long-time weakness—he tightens up on second serves on break points early in matches. If I were an opponent, I might even intentionally miss my first one in those situations. Overall, though, if that’s your most noticeable weakness, you don't have too much to fear.