I meant to comment earlier but thoughts on Davydenko/Meddy. At his best on hard like Meddy but improved on clay and had done great results. I watched a few of his clay highlights ( Monte Carlo, RG) recently thinking about this. Right up on baseline, cutting off spin angles with his quick feet and whippy swings. I do find Meddy is too far back ( bigger swing?). Can he adapt? Take it earlier? Reduce the swing? No one talks about Davydenko anymore but as a flatter hitter against more spinny balls he had huge success. Thoughts?
I noticed that there is a set of young players - Tsitsipas, Auger-Aliassime, Mussetti, Thiem - who move back on a substantial amount of their second serve returns, be interesting to hear your thoughts on that.
I put everyone in opposite Djokovic since I figured you might as well compare them to best returned. Happy to see one of my fave youngsters, Jannik Sinner, has almost identical return position including, like Djokovic, very little variation in position.
Also interesting that while Federer (unsurprising) and Murray (a little surprising) have more aggressive return positions than Djokovic, the only youngster I put in with a more aggressive position was de Minaur (and he varies more, sometimes less aggressive on second sometimes more).
Be good if someone put a number on distance from baseline on the four return positions so one could quickly scan everyone's relative aggression though the graphics are fantastic for seeing the variation.
Terrific first post; great link to the fogmount article which has much more of interest related to bounce and hard court variation. I assume all serves are relatively flat in terms of topspin and so this analysis isn't relevant to servers on clay.
I meant to comment earlier but thoughts on Davydenko/Meddy. At his best on hard like Meddy but improved on clay and had done great results. I watched a few of his clay highlights ( Monte Carlo, RG) recently thinking about this. Right up on baseline, cutting off spin angles with his quick feet and whippy swings. I do find Meddy is too far back ( bigger swing?). Can he adapt? Take it earlier? Reduce the swing? No one talks about Davydenko anymore but as a flatter hitter against more spinny balls he had huge success. Thoughts?
You tweeted this out which is fascinating:
http://on-the-t.com/2021/04/17/Return-Impact-H2H/
I noticed that there is a set of young players - Tsitsipas, Auger-Aliassime, Mussetti, Thiem - who move back on a substantial amount of their second serve returns, be interesting to hear your thoughts on that.
I put everyone in opposite Djokovic since I figured you might as well compare them to best returned. Happy to see one of my fave youngsters, Jannik Sinner, has almost identical return position including, like Djokovic, very little variation in position.
Also interesting that while Federer (unsurprising) and Murray (a little surprising) have more aggressive return positions than Djokovic, the only youngster I put in with a more aggressive position was de Minaur (and he varies more, sometimes less aggressive on second sometimes more).
Be good if someone put a number on distance from baseline on the four return positions so one could quickly scan everyone's relative aggression though the graphics are fantastic for seeing the variation.
Ow thats great. Subscribing in 3, 2, 1... Good job Matt
Terrific first post; great link to the fogmount article which has much more of interest related to bounce and hard court variation. I assume all serves are relatively flat in terms of topspin and so this analysis isn't relevant to servers on clay.