!Sod by Pete Bodo
The ATP season is off to a blazing start, the operative word being "blazing." Remember how, not so long ago, it seemed that the incremental slowing of the courts combined with the maturation of the power baseline game indicated that the future would belong to the critter generally known as the "grinder," albeit in his most highly developed state?
Then along came Roger Federer, to make us rethink the template. Of course, Federer is a once-in-a-lifetime player—a genius. He's the outlier, even if he dominates the game. When Rafael Nadal emerged as Federer's main rival and nothing less than his nemesis on clay, it lent credence to the conventional wisdom. Federer could be neutralized and beaten, although it required a level of ability and skill set not given to many.
But Federer's degree of skill and offensive capacity had a downstream effect that was profound. He served notice that even if outright attacking tennis, especially traditonal serve-and-volley tennis, was no longer tenable, neither was its polar opposite, defensive, consistency-based grinding—what you might call the David Ferrer problem, if a solidly established Top 10 player can be said to personify one. What Federer did, even before his recent re-embrace of the aggressive game (which was in mid-season form in today's blowout of Nikolay Davydenko in Doha), was force his rivals to quite simply go for more, more of the time. And this mandate to take your shots when they present themselves has become the new norm.
Nobody wins big anymore if he isn't willing to pull the trigger when an opportunity presents itself. And only Nadal has the kind of skills that enable him to be not just a Federer tormentor, but a reverse-mirror image of his rival. Only Nadal can do what Federer does on offense from a defensive and sometimes seemingly hopeless position. Apart from Nadal, the players most likely to succeed these days are those trigger-pullers—the Novak Djokovics, Robin Soderlings, Tomas Berdychs and Juan Martin del Potros. Throw Fernando Verdasco, flaws and all, in there, too.
Andy Murray and Andy Roddick are borderline characters in this scenario, because Murray gravitates more to a Nadal-esque sensibility (his best offense flows from his superb defense), and his problem may be put pretty simply—he's not Nadal. Roddick is by nature a trigger-puller, but his groundstroke skills are not on par with his serving abilities. This may make his life a little more difficult in a few hours, when he plays Soderling, the player who most consistently represents the lessons learned in the era of Federer.
Soderling knows that it's all about finishing, and that's a wonderful lesson to grasp. He won his first two clashes with Roddick, one on hard court and one on the surface on which Soderling is especially dangerous, carpet. (How a guy can end up with indoor carpet and outdoor clay as his two best surfaces is a bit byeond me.) Last year, Roddick exacted revenge in two outdoor hard-court meetings before Soderling nosed ahead 3-2 by bamboozling Roddick on the indoor hard court in Paris this fall.
The interesting element in this week's tournaments is that you'd think they'd hung a sign: Defensive-minded players need not apply. Even Davydenko, while saddled with a slight physique and a relative lack of power, plays an aggressive game based on relatively flat, laser-like counterpunches. The advantages of aggressive, attacking tennis are manifold, and it was just a matter of time before players worked out exactly how be aggressive on the fundamentallhy slow courts used today. Federer bumped the process along, less because of his own capaciity to play offense (a capacity he can afford to neglect, although not without a price) than because of the demand placed on his rivals to do something/anything to try to stop him.
We're seeing the fruits of that process in this week's finals.