nehmeth said:
the AntiPusher said:
So can you tell me how did Stan beat the brakes off your new 'beloved" at RG 2015.
Hey Push:
“At the French Open he (Novak) played too tentative, he wanted Stan (Wawrinka) to miss the balls, but you are not going to win a Grand Slam final by waiting for the other guy to miss.†- Boris Becker
link - http://www.atpworldtour.com/en/news/wimbledon-2015-final-brain-game-djokovic-federer
Meanwhile, Stan redlined for pretty much the entire match. Had Novak gone after the ball more, Stan
still might have won, but it would have been a helluva lot more interesting final.
It's really rare to see someone go after the ball if their opponent was hitting it as big, and as cleanly as Stan was. Very few players actually fight fire with fire (I can think of Blake, Gonzalez and the those type of guys that will just go after the ball no matter what, and I don't think it's a particularly good idea), but it's really hard to beat your opponent at a game he does better than you.
Novak was hitting the ball aggressively enough in the first set (nothing spectacular or anything) but he didn't suddenly just stop being aggressive for no reason. That's the thing in tennis, what happens on one side of the net directly affects what happens on the other. There's a reason in all of my years of watching tennis, when someone has a quasi career best performance in which everything clicks, they look intimidatingly unstoppable.
It's not that Novak couldn't have done anything. But what he could have done is pretty theoretical and not at all easy to do under the barrage that Stan was throwing at him. Players' natural reaction when an "inferior" opponent catches fire is often "let's see how long he can keep this up" which makes enough sense when you think about how many matches they've won by basically weathering the storm.
The surface makes a difference too, as it gives Stan more time to line up his balls and in a way negates Novak's counter-punching (the idea that counter-punching is best suited for clay in today's game is outdated), so he had a real hard time turning rallies around compared to their AO matches. As in, yes Novak has more time to get to Stan's balls, but conversely, Stan has more time to go for huge shots even from miles behind the baseline - something that he does extremely well.
Eventually, this led to some self doubt that ultimately stopped Novak from trying to initiate even when he had the chance to get the ascendency in the rallies, so in that regard, yeah, I guess Boris could say Novak was too tentative, but there's a whole load of factors that led to him reaching that point. That's why I find Boris' assessment simplistic, but understandable as he's going to look at it from his player's perspective and really, it was just a quick answer in an interview - he wasn't about to go into detail as to what transpired on the court.
Plus really, I've always maintained this: when a top 10 player plays his absolute best (in the strictest sense of the word), he cannot be beaten, because one player playing his best means preventing the other from playing his. I don't believe in "both players playing their best tennis at the same time" as I think the two are incompatible and mutually exclusive. There are times, when we're lucky enough, where it comes close to that (Stan and Novak at the AO in 2013 for example, or Fed-Safin), but that's on a rare day. Plus, think of the load of mental and physical factors that have to be going in your favor for you to match your opponent's play when he's close to his best, which makes it all the more amazing when it happens.
uzzled :nono :angel: :dodgy:
