April Racquet Mailbag
April Racquet Mailbag
Clay line-calling, left handed advantages, shitpoasting, netflix attention, Alcaraz weakness, tennis pundit opinions about Ukraine, Raducanu's coaches, two handed forehands
I nearly forgot about Mailbag this month so I’m squeezing this one in at the very end of April. Madrid is already upon us.
Once again I asked a bunch of you on twitter for questions, and once again you asked some great ones.
Matt: Probably good. Maybe. The thing that still doesn’t seem to have permeated the consciousness of many tennis fans is that any electronic line calling system on clay is going to mean that two line calling systems are running simultaneously whether we like it or not: Foxtenn/hawkeye and the ball marks.
Most of the time, especially with Foxtenn which claims to have a zero error margin (dubious), the challenge system decision and the ball mark will be in agreement. But every now and then the two systems will disagree, due to either margin of error or due to the physics of ball bounces and the marks they leave behind. And in those instances how do you tell a player to ignore the ball mark, as evidence, that’s right in front of them? I wrote about this in more detail here, but if we’re going to use electronic line calling on clay then we’re probably going to have to start disregarding ball marks, which is going to be tough. This happened last week in Barcelona with Alcaraz pointing to an ‘out’ ball mark but Foxtenn showing the ball ‘in’. This raises a bunch of unnecessary, irritating philosophical questions about what actually constitutes ‘in’ or ‘out’ on a clay court.
Answer is still probably yes, it’s a good thing. But it’s nowhere close to as simple as many players and fans make it out to be.
— The advantage of being a lefty in tennis is often overstated at the pro and elite levels. But there is an interesting advantage when it comes to a particular bit of performance: AD side serving. Right handed players statistically perform better serving to the Deuce side and lefty players statistically perform better serving to the AD side. Anyone who’s watched lefties hit their slider serves out wide on the AD side will have a decent understanding of why. But that AD side also happens to be where many pressure (influential) points happen, including break points at 30-40 and Deuce-AD. Lefties have about a 2% performance edge on average over righties on those, often crucial or influential, break points on that AD side.
Matt: No. I think Tsitsipas has gotten better in some areas on a hard court since 2019 and remained relatively static in others. The thing that often confuses people about Tsitsipas on hard courts is that he won his first and still biggest title on indoor hard court in 2019 at the ATP Finals, despite going on to have his best results on clay in the years since. But as I’ve written about a bunch of times, Tsitsipas can cover up the cracks in his hard court game (return and backhand defence) when he has either very good serving days (pushing sets to tiebreakers at worst) or above average return days. His ATP Finals level in 2019 was a good combination of those two. Tsitsipas will keep having chances to win big hard court titles when he’s serving well (more common) and when he’s going through return purple patches (more rare). But until his return and backhand defence improve to a certain point, he’ll have to rely on finding that A game more often than some of his more hard-court-suited elite peers, which will probably mean more variance on that surface. In my mind Tsitsipas is a player with more pronounced peaks and troughs relative to some of the more balanced players his age and younger, but those peaks can still be extremely high regardless of whether he improves from here or not.
The other factor is that other, younger players have emerged or broken through since 2019 who can trouble Tsitsipas on hard courts other than Djokovic, Nadal, Medvedev et al. For example, Alcaraz and Auger-Aliassime have both beaten Tsitsipas on hard courts this year and can exploit some of his weaknesses on the quicker surfaces.
Matt: I have no idea. I hope it’ll blow up and attract people outside tennis’ usual sphere of influence. And for various reasons I think that the way tennis is currently perceived means this sport is set up quite well for similar success if the showrunners get it right. But it remains to be seen how it navigates having fly-on-the-wall access to some players and not others. This worked in season one of Drive To Survive back in 2018/19, when there were still significant restrictions over access, because it allowed the creators to often focus on storylines in the middle of the pack of drivers rather than just tracking results. But it will be interesting to see whether non or new tennis fans who are exposed to the show will end up getting a very different idea of what happened this season compared to those who have followed the tour closely week in week out. Taylor Fritz winning Indian Wells was likely huge for the show because it combines both elements — fly-on-the-wall access and a big result that shapes the story of how the season really unfolded — rather than just one or the other.
Matt: The vague consensus at the moment is that Alcaraz’ only real weakness, aside from elements of his serve (although he has an excellent kick serve and can land very fast 1st serves despite his height), is shot tolerance. De Minaur exploited this at times against Alcaraz last week in Barcelona, with the Aussie coaxing errors by just putting enough balls back in play thanks to his ability as the human backboard. But I’ve also seen Alcaraz play percentage, higher margin tennis extremely well at times during some of his matches (including his run in Indian Wells), so I’m not quite ready to say that’s a ‘weakness’. And even if it is, his weapons are so powerful that very, very few players are going to be able to defend well enough to counter those first few big strikes anyway. Although that would be a logical argument in favour of hard courts being his best surface, with his weapons doing more work on quicker surfaces.
As far as the rest of his game, there’s very little to poke holes in. Both his groundstrokes are superb, repeatable yet aggressive. His net instincts are extraordinarily good relative to most players his age right now. And his raw, explosive movement is as close as I’ve ever seen to a young Nadal. He doesn’t open the court up as much as Nadal from the baseline because of Nadal’s superior use of angles, but Alcaraz puts so much power on his groundstrokes that it rarely matters. I’m super curious to see 2022 Alcaraz play Medvedev and Zverev on hard courts (and Brooksby too), because both (at their best) defend linear power extremely well and will provide some answers to the above.
Matt: Yes. For those that don’t know, the PGA have something called the Player Impact Program which identifies the 10 biggest ‘needle-movers’ in golf and pays them through a $40m fund, compensating players that produce the most engagement from fans and sponsors. While the elite and most famous players in tennis are certainly not the ones who need more money, tying cause to effect for how, why and which players are pulling in attention is really valuable information when trying to optimise for the growth of the sport.
More generally I think tennis could stand to get smarter about two things.
Giving players much better resources for becoming mini-CEO’s of their one-man/woman media empires.
Building better internal reporting tools when it comes to which players are bringing in attention to the sport and how. These do already exist to some degree.
Golf has decided on its own way to measure ‘moving the needle’ based on viewership, broadcast time/focus, social reach etc. But really I’d just like to see more open merit-based performance markers for tennis players and their reach off and on court.
This is also one of the reasons I’d like tennis to overhaul their streaming platforms with more customised viewing experiences and more obvious community building around each specific player. There’s a longer piece on this coming soon.
Matt: From my perspective one of the most confusing things throughout the reaction to Wimbledon’s ban of Russians and Belarusians has been the confidence of many on both sides of the debate. Especially from those who remain almost entirely unaffected from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The issue is unbelievably complex with no particularly conclusive, empirical evidence (either way) for whether sporting sanctions are effective or not, and whether they should apply in this instance. I wrote more on this here, but tbh I’m thoroughly bored of reading strong, simplistic opinions on this from non-Ukrainians or non-Russians who work in the field of hitting a small yellow spheroid around a rectangle.
Matt: Apologies for not answering this properly but I’m writing something about this at the moment! Something that is interesting to me along these lines is the idea that the current 2022 ATP Top 10 are significantly closer in playstyle to the 2005 top ten (17 year difference) than the 2005 Top 10 were to the 1988 top 10 (17 year difference). There are plenty of obvious and non-obvious reasons for this but will put them in a long form piece.
Matt: This is an extremely niche ‘tennis twitter’ topic that many of you readers may have no idea about. But there’s currently tension between fans and certain journalists over fans supposed responsibility to report tennis news and quotes accurately on social media.
For the record, tennis fans have no real obligation to act professionally. They are not professionals. But the wider context here is that during the last decade there has been an increasingly interesting blurring of the lines between professional media and non-professional media. There’s an old pre-internet saying called Greener's Law which reads:
Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel.
This references the old fashioned power asymmetry between professional media and the general public. Journalists used to hold the rare keys to information coupled with distribution. But the internet has changed this dynamic entirely. The average person, whether ‘journalist’ or not, has the power of direct distribution on social media as long as they’re part of a community or network. This chips away at that power asymmetry and often leaves old school journalists frustrated with their newly diminished power status. This frustration is amplified further for those writers who work in less serious areas of journalism like sports writing. 99% of sports journalism is by nature, either promotional or non-serious. The 1% are things like match fixing reporting, domestic violence, drug abuses, and governance. This means that the vast majority of sports media is fun and light, and guess who’s better at creating fun and light media than professional journalists? Young sports fans who have grown up with the internet and can churn out funny shitposts and memes (the fastest spreading forms of media these days) far more effectively than those old school writers.
This doesn’t mean journalists aren’t important. Long form reporting is still extremely valuable, most of all in more serious industries, but also still in sport. It just means that the most widely read and seen journalists will have to have a grasp of both the trivial and serious sides of reporting and accept that fans (via user generated content) will be king, at least in aggregate, from now on. This tension will continue to get worse and we will also see more and more ‘journalists’ who are merely fans aggregating content rather than actually creating anything, further blurring the lines.
The other aspect to this is that the internet is currently divided between those who have grown up on, or have been heavily exposed to, the internet for much of their lives and those that haven’t. Those that have grown up on the internet are better at navigating and parsing the very hostile information environment we currently find ourselves in. This is why what are often seen as harmless shitposts and memes by native, usually younger, internet users can look like dangerous misinformation to those less equipped to sail those seas of hostile information. This is also almost certainly why some of the most feral and misinformed conspiracy groups are currently made up of overly susceptible middle-aged or older facebook users. Memes are extremely potent in their ability to spread, but they’re most powerful among those who haven’t learned how to effectively parse information which moves at the speed of modern internet culture. For this reason I’m actually sympathetic to journalists worrying about misinformation in this context, but I’m afraid this dynamic is only going to speed up for them, not slow down.
Matt: The difference between Wimbledon doing it and other ATP/WTA tournaments doing it is that the ATP/WTA can meaningfully sanction ATP/WTA run tournaments where they can’t with Wimbledon (which is ‘run’ by the ITF but is really just an all powerful island that can do whatever they want). The Tours could take away ranking points from Wimbledon for one year but this would have little practical effect considering Wimbledon’s commercial and player pull.
Matt: Piece about Alcaraz’ drop shots out on Sunday for paid subscribers!
Matt: The more I think about this the more I don’t think she’ll have one, or at least one that will be truly competitive with her. I would like to be proven wrong.
Matt: It’s very player specific. For this I’m just going to quote what Emma said two days ago because she knows why she’s gone through four coaches in quick succession infinitely better than me:
"Torben (now ex coach) is a great guy. I really enjoyed my time with him on and off the court. He is one of the nicest people I've met so obviously it was a tough one to split with someone like that. But I feel like right now I'm very comfortable with my current training. I'm feeling very confident in what I'm doing and how I'm working.
I feel like over the last few weeks, it's definitely become more apparent, and especially as I've spent more time on the tour playing more matches against these top opponents, that I kind of understand what I feel like I need more of.
I think going forward I'll probably be putting a lot more emphasis on sparring. It is becoming more apparent to me as I spend more time on the tour is just getting used to these girls' ball speed. I felt like in my quarter-final match (vs Swiatek in Stuttgart last week), I was just trying to get used to the ball speed in the first few games and had a bit of a slow start because of that. I like to mix it up. I like to work very specifically and I'm very clear on what I want to work A lot of the time those ideas come from myself.
"I feel like I don't really need a conventional, you know, [person with] just this title: Emma Raducanu's coach. From a young age, I haven't necessarily always had a coach, and when I was training alone growing up, I had to learn to be my own coach. I feel that is something that I am pretty good at - actually understanding the game [and] studying it. A lot of the time, I feel that I know all the answers that I am coming to myself."
"With Nigel (Sears) I was actually training with him three years at least. He's a great coach with a lot of experience, but after three years with anyone you also feel like you need to try and progress and learn something else. I feel like sometimes it's not down to me either. Sometimes it's something from their end and they can't continue, not just me saying 'Okay, I've had enough now."
The recurring theme here is Raducanu feeling like she wants to structure her development from her own instincts rather than a career long coach’s. Seemingly happy to absorb the wisdom from one coach and then move on. Whether this is correct will be answered in her results over the next few years. But again, there is no one-size-fits-all for player coach relationships. Just because a lifelong coach works for one person doesn’t mean it would be optimal for Emma.
Matt: Advantage: power. Almost every player has more offensive potential from their forehand than their backhand. If you have two forehands then in theory you have more offensive potential.
Disadvantage: Timing. Switching hands with two forehands is almost always more time consuming than conventional forehand and backhand grip switching, and it’s why the two-handed forehands are usually weeded out somewhere between juniors and professional levels as the speed of the game ramps up. The game has not gotten slower over the past decade so it would be surprising to see a a two-handed forehand break through to the elite levels.
Thanks for reading and thanks for all the great questions as always. Apologies to those who asked questions I didn’t get to.
— MW
Twitter: @mattracquet
I’ll see paid subscribers on Sunday for analysis on Sunday.
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These are always such a fun and interesting read, thank you.
Hi Matt. Nice piece, as usual. Another obvious advantage lefties have over righties that you missed is that - because righties are much more common in the population and on the tour - both righties and lefies are used to playing righties, but righties don't have as much experience playing against lefties, so there's an adjustment righties have to make facing lefties that lefties don't have to make facing righties.
Basically, lefties are used to dealing with the cross-court forehand vs backhand conundrum, and how best to optimise the situation to their advantage. And lefties are used to wide sliced serves to their backhand and how to neutralise them.