If you closely watch Rafael Nadal's serving patterns, you'll notice that he rarely goes wide in the deuce court.
I've charted Nadal's serving patterns for most of the last 2 French finals and the last 2 Wimbledon finals.
As I've noted before Nadal often basically lets you know where's he's going to serve. His reasoning must be that his slice serve is good enough to get a relatively weak return that will allow him to begin to dominate the point with his forehand.
You can't really argue with his results. You could possibly say that this serving strategy is less suited for tiebreaks where free points on the serve are much more important than in regular games. Ergo, he lost both tiebreaks to Fed and his tiebreak record is not all that hot.
Nadal is quite capable and fairly confident, in my opinion, in serving down the middle in the ad court. If you cheat too much to take away the wide serve, he can burn you with smoke down the middle. He did this repeatedly in the latter stages of last year's Wimbledon finals.
As you recall Nadal got smoked at the beginning of the first set of last year's Wimbledon and was down 5-0. I charted his serving pattern and he had served 11 out of the first 13 first serves to the backhand.
I believe that last year Federer received so much grief in the tennis world stemming from his inablity to return the Nadal serve at the French Open. People like Wilander were basically saying why not just stand further to the left to cover the slice and make him beat you by going the other way if he can. Federer may have used this strategy to return at Wimbledon and was giving Nadal trouble.
Near the end of the first set in the Wimbledon final last year, Nadal started serving down the middle in the ad court and he continued this for the rest of the match. He served almost 50 % of his ad points last year in the second set down the middle and he won 80% of the points.
So, I believe that Nadal is quite capable of mixing it up in the ad court.
Where I think Nadal has trouble is in the deuce court. He rarely serves the wide serve in the deuce court. This of course the serve that Fed, Sampras, and McEnroe all had mastered. ( I'm talking about the Fed and Sampras wide serve in the ad court and the Mac serve in the deuce court since Mac was a lefty like Nadal). These great servers serve wide and get the ball a few feet up the line making the serve almost unreturnable.
And, by being able to serve this wide, they force the opponent to alter the return position, making the serve down the middle more effective.
Look at Nadal's starting position in the deuce court and then compare it with the starting position in the deuce court of other lefties like Mac, Rusedski, Leconte, Gomez, Martina.
All these other lefties stand a few feet away from the center line. Nadal hugs the center line when he serves in the deuce court. I believe this gives him an even better angle for the serve down the middle but hurts his angle for going wide in the deuce court.
You can't argue with Nadal's results but I'd like to see what would happen if Nadal moved a few feet further away from the center line in the deuce court like the others and improved the wide serve.
If I were his coach and he struggled this year again on the hard courts, I'd experiment with this idea to see what happens.
Until next time,
Glenn Sheiner M.D. - author of Insider Tennis Strategies Tennis Strategy Tactics And Ideas To Help You Improve Your Game guaranteed to make you a smarter tennis player and take your tennis to the next level. Also, check out the world's top tennis humor screensaver
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