In a few weeks’ time at the Davis Cup final, in Lille, the French will be cheering against Roger Federer—at least if Gilles Simon gets his way. Today, however, the Swiss star remained their hero. A fallen hero, it turned out, as he was beaten—although “brutalized” might be a better word—in the Paris Masters quarterfinals by No. 7 seed Milos Raonic.
The 23-year-old Canadian rained down 22 aces, an average of nearly two a game, in a tight 7-6 (5), 7-5 match that flew by in a mere hour and 33 minutes, or roughly the same amount of time it takes Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic to decide a game that goes to deuce and ad. It was also a match in which the attack—Federer’s fearless approaches to the net and Raonic’s serve—figured so large that it seemed as if we had been thrown back two or three decades in time, back to when indoor matches like this one often were contested on fast carpet, back to when it was not entirely uncommon to describe a match by simply saying, “He served his opponent off the court.”
When was the last time you saw a match that could be described with that phrase?
While that could easily be said of today’s clash, there was more to it than that. After all, Raonic was 0-6 against Federer coming into this one, and in those six meetings he had broken Federer just once. Today he doubled that total. Hey, it’s a start.
Raonic had won first-set tiebreakers over Federer on two other occasions, only to lose his nerve and then his serve. Not this time. Perhaps Raonic ought to be put in the position of fighting for his competitive life more often.
That’s not a mere figure of speech, either. Raonic came into this match with a slim chance to qualify for the year-end ATP World Tour Finals, which begin in London in a little over a week. A lot will have to happen for Raonic to slip in under the wire, but none of that would have mattered had Federer, who has already qualified for London, won this match. A loss would have eliminated Raonic from the hunt.
Raonic has been a model of consistency throughout his brief career, yet he often has come up short, or pulled back, just when he seemed on the verge of a major breakthrough. Perhaps he has never felt quite the urgency he faced in today’s do-or-die situation. It’s something that he will have to think about in this off-season if he hopes to take that big step from Grand Slam contender to Grand Slam champion.
But let’s get back to those vital details that make it silly to grumble that all Raonic did was bang out aces. While Federer could not match his rival’s count in that department, he did hit eight of his own. More important, he attacked so effectively that he won his own service games with just as much alacrity as Raonic. In one three-game stretch in the first set, the games evaporated in, successively, 59, 52, and 60 seconds. And Federer served two of those three games, just in case you thought I’m trying to pull a fast one.
The importance of Raonic’s 22 aces was undeniable, and a 67 percent first-serve conversion rate certainly helped. But Raonic also won 65 percent of his second-serve points, which was 11 percentage points better than Federer’s total. Raonic was able to do that because he smacked 45 winners, loads of them with a devastating inside-out forehand, to the 25 managed by Federer. The 21 unforced errors by Raonic (compared to 13 by Federer) were a more than acceptable toll to pay. Note, too, that in rallies that lasted between five and nine shots, each man won the point 13 times. Usually, that’s an area where Federer has shown great superiority to Raonic, but not on this day.
Like other matches in which the role of the serve looms large—or used to loom large, when courts and balls were fast enough to reward the key shot in tennis—this one seemed destined to be decided by that age-old question: Who’s going to be the first to blink?
In both cases, the answer was: The all-time Grand Slam singles champion.
In the first set, Federer failed to capitalize on having won the first point of the tiebreaker. He dropped his ensuing two service points, the first by virtue of a Raonic volley winner, the second by a Raonic inside-out forehand placement. There were no more mini-breaks, and while Federer served his way through two set points for Raonic, the younger man closed him out at 6-5 with an ace.
In the second set, Federer had a set point in the 10th game, with Raonic serving at 4-5. But the 6’5” lad wouldn’t blink. He smacked ace number 22 to get to deuce, and then hit an unreturned serve and an inside-out forehand winner to hold for 5-all.
In the very next game, a pair of errors by Federer put Raonic up, 15-30. Raonic then hit the shot of the match, an inside out cross-court forehand service-return winner that brought him to break point. He converted it with a cross-court backhand passing shot that Federer couldn’t touch. Raonic served out the match comfortably, ending it with yet another forehand winner off a Federer service return.