Summing up Saturday: Federer's serve, Kerber's fight and Novak's spark

LONDON—We had seen this movie from Angelique Kerber before in 2017; too many times, really. Here was the putative world No. 1, at a Grand Slam, one of the tournaments where No. 1 players are supposed to raise their games. And here she was again, down a set and 2-4 to a hard-hitting, lower-ranked player that she was expected to beat. At the Australian Open, it had been CoCo Vandeweghe who swatted her off the court, 6-2, 6-3. At the French Open, Ekaterina Makarova had done the honors, 6-2, 6-2. Now it looked like Shelby Rogers, an American ranked 70th who had never won a match at Wimbledon before this week, was sure to knock Kerber out of the tournament and off her No. 1 pedestal.

As in those other two losses, Kerber looked overmatched by Rogers. Without having to do anything extraordinary, the American pushed Kerber back and controlled the rallies. So with all hope—or most hope—seemingly lost, Kerber did what she hadn’t done all day, and what she essentially hasn’t done this year. She swung out. And in doing so, she found something familiar: a down-the-line forehand.

This was her bread-and-butter shot, the one that won her the U.S. Open last year. And it won her a point against Rogers; more important, Kerber was able to win a point on her own terms, with offense rather than defense. It must have felt like déjà vu for her. While she didn’t play perfectly the rest of the way, she played with more grit, and she slowly turned the match in her direction, eventually winning, 4-6, 7-6 (2), 6-4.

“It was tough to find my rhythm, actually,” said Kerber, who had never faced Rogers before. “She played very well from the first point. She was hitting the balls very hard. I was just trying to find my rhythm.

“I think that was the key in the second set, that I was really fighting and I was moving better. I was running better to every single ball.”

In an NFL game, they‘re called broken plays; in a basketball game, they’re called loose balls. In tennis they’re the rallies that are up for grabs, the ones where both players are scrambling up and back, or caught in no-man’s land. They’re won by the player who hustles just a little more to track one last ball down, who finds the open court with a reflex volley, who gets one more ball back in the court. Kerber, fighting as she hasn’t fought this year, won those points on Saturday.

“Focus!” Novak Djokovic yelled 10 minutes into the start of his third-round match. He wasn’t yelling at himself, but at chair umpire Jake Gardner. Djokovic thought Gardner had made three early mistakes, and the former champ had no time for imperfection today. Djokovic had nearly lost to his opponent, Ernests Gulbis, two years ago, and he wasn’t taking any chances on a repeat performance. He was right to be concerned; Gulbis came out firing, broke with a rifle-shot forehand and took a 4-2 first-set lead.

But while Djokovic was trailing on the scoreboard—a phenomenon that has happened more often this year than in the past—there was something about his manner on Saturday that said he was either going to mount a comeback or lose his mind trying. The shots might not have been there early, but the intensity, the emotional aggressiveness that had been missing in Paris, was very much present.

With Djokovic, where intensity is, his game will likely soon follow. He broke Gulbis for 4-4, broke again for the set and broke Gulbis’ spirit in the process. Djokovic won the way he always wins at his best; by not giving his opponent, even a power-hitting opponent like Gulbis, anywhere to go. Djokovic sent back Gulbis’ first serves and won 62 percent of the points on his second serve. By the end of the second set, Gulbis looked like a lost soul, wandering in confusion. In the third he got it together, but Djokovic, roaring with virtually every point, met him again with that amped-up will to win, and did it by the final score of 6-4, 6-1, 7-6 (2).

Told that Boris Becker, his former coach, had said he liked the sound of those roars, and that they made him feel like the Serb’s passion for the game was back, Djokovic agreed.

“Boris knows me well,” Djokovic said. “So he’s right when he says that the passion is back. I’ve been feeling better on the court in the last couple of months. But especially on the grass court this season so far.”

Djokovic said that his current coaching situation, with Andre Agassi and Mario Ancic, has been “fantastic ... It didn’t take us too much to really connect.”

On Saturday, Djokovic showed some of his old brash spirit. Whether it was his parents or Marian Vajda or Becker, he has always liked having a team in the corner, a group who will make it “us against the world” instead of “me against the world.” Agassi and Ancic haven’t been around long enough to do anything to his game. But if they’ve brought that defiant spirit back, they may already have done enough.

It was 5-5 in the first set, and Roger Federer was down break point to Mischa Zverev. Federer was edgy, and the Centre Court crowd was antsy. He had already handed back an early break; was he going to do the unthinkable and lose his first set of the tournament? Was there going to be trouble in Wimbledon paradise on this sunny summer Saturday?

Even if you didn’t see the match, you probably know how Federer answered that question: He hit an ace. Then he held serve. Then, in the ensuing tiebreaker, he began with a service winner, and hit another to go up 3-1. A few points later, the first set was his. From there, it was mostly a smooth ride to a quintessential 7-6 (3), 6-4, 6-4 third-round win—Federer is now 48-1 in Grand Slam third rounds. When he did hit a slight bump in the road—like when he went down 15-30 at 4-3 in the third—Federer’s serve was there to bail him out again.

“I think today I had really good focus on my serve, on my first shot,” Federer said. “It was avoidable not to be broken in the first set, but then I had to hang on to it with being down one break point or two break points at 5-all in the first set. That was definitely a key moment.

“But I thought I had great focus. The serve is clearly important. I mean, good servers do usually quite well here on the grass.”

There’s a case to be made that Federer’s serve is the most important shot in the history of the men’s game—it’s the most successful male player’s most reliable, get-out-of-trouble weapon. Even in a routine Federer win, watching him serve—watching him change speeds, spins and placements depending on the moment, watching him think and try to read what his opponent is thinking—can be a compelling mini-game in itself, a sport within a sport. For all of the talent that Federer brings to the court, there’s thought to match it.

It’s compelling for everyone but his opponent, that is. The first time I noticed Zverev jump out wide to return a second serve also happened to be the first time I noticed Federer send it down the middle instead. Like most things he does on a tennis court, it was no accident.

—GRAND SLAM WEEK: WatchWimbledon Primetime on Tennis Channel, and catch up on the other 2017 Grand Slams on Tennis Channel Plus

—Watch encores from the 2017 French Open and Australian Open on Tennis Channel Plus, including matches like the AO Final showdown between Serena & Venus Williams**