In a column for CNN, former Wimbledon champion and TV analyst Pat Cash laments the state of the current men’s game, calling it too homogenous.
“There’s an argument that this generation of men’s tennis is boring and I think it’s a valid one,” Cash wrote. “It’s not boring to see two great players like Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic compete in a final. What is getting mundane is watching the same tactic in every single match of every single Grand Slam for the last five or six years. Nowadays they all settle down and say ‘OK, this is going to be two hours of baseline rallies.’ The guy who outlasts the other one wins. It’s taken a lot of the skill out of tennis.”
The Australian also says that today’s greats are not better athletes than those standouts who came before them.
“They are not better all-round players than the likes of Boris Becker or Pete Sampras. Boris and Pete were baseline players, they were attacking players and they could do it against baseliners like Mats Wilander or Andre Agassi,” Cash said. “Now that was entertainment. You never knew which way it was going to go. Nadal and Djokovic are exceptional athletes, there’s no doubt about it, but to say they are better athletes than past greats like Bjorn Borg and Stefan Edberg is just nonsense. This is some crap drummed up by somebody and I think it’s an insult to past players. Modern players don’t dive around the net, they don’t deliver backhand smashes, they don’t have to twist and turn like past generations. Could modern players do that? We don’t know. What we do know is that they are incredibly good at retrieving shots from the back of the court.”