Tag: Tennis

There may come a time when Leylah Fernandez and Emma Raducanu are in the draw of a major tournament and one of their names does not immediately follow the other in the tennis consciousness.

Maybe, but not yet.  

One of them has been grinding her way up and down and back up the ever-shifting ladder that is women’s professional tennis. 

The other struggled for a year and a half to string wins together, then called it a season and had three surgeries — on each wrist and one of her ankles — on one grim day last spring. That was not long before the other one realized she needed to hit her own career restart button, too. 

One is the daughter of finance executives, the product of a Chinese father and a Romanian mother, raised in Great Britain with plenty of advantages and the chance to choose among the finest universities had she gone down that path. 

The other grew up in Canada and then on the hot hard courts of Florida, driven by desire and her father, a former Ecuadorian soccer player, to make a living with a tennis racket.

Other than being born in Canada nine weeks apart, Emma Raducanu and Leylah Fernandez do not share much in common. They aren’t any more than professional acquaintances. 

Inevitably, they will always be more than that and always be linked because of those magical two weeks a little more than two years ago, when they were still teenagers co-starring in the zaniest Grand Slam tennis tournament that will ever happen. When nearly three weeks of competition had ended, Raducanu, a relative unknown outside of Great Britain, had won 10 straight matches, including the qualifying tournament, and 20 straight sets, and defeated Fernandez, the world’s 73rd-ranked player but the second-most unlikely finalist that day, for the championship.

There has been plenty of frustration for both of them since. Hard losses and early-round exits, hard lessons about life in the spotlight, and strings of injuries that sometimes felt like they would never cease. Raducanu, especially, looked mostly miserable with each tournament and each loss, especially during the final months when she was playing in constant pain.

But here they are this week in Melbourne, into the second round on opposite sides of the draw, getting busy with the next phase of their tennis lives at an age when most players are still trying to get their teeth into the first one. 

For Raducanu, 21, that meant a first-round win on Tuesday evening over the American veteran Shelby Rogers that was as solid as it needed to be. Rogers, 31, was searching for form after an injury-induced six-month layoff, but for long stretches, Raducanu showcased so much of the style that sent her to those lofty heights — the easy, deceptively fast movement, the low, whipping and curling power off the ground, even a feathery backhand drop shot and, most importantly, the ability to not beat herself with careless errors. 

The final score was 6-3, 6-2 and it wasn’t really that close. More of that and Raducanu will be ranked much higher than 296th in the world before long.

“All aspects of my life are calming down and settled,” Raducanu said. “When you come back after eight months, have experienced three surgeries, you’re just really grateful to move freely.”

Raducanu is fit again after three surgeries (James D Morgan/Getty Images)

This all went down a couple of days after Fernandez won one of the first matches of the tournament, a straight-sets win over Sara Bejlek of the Czech Republic. Sure, Bejlek was just a 17-year-old qualifier, but this was a different Fernandez who wasn’t just staying in points and chasing down balls in the corners like she always has, but also sprinting to the net to finish them off like she rarely has before.   

“I can’t always be a grinder or just a returner,” Fernandez said as she sat in a soft chair in a Melbourne Park corridor a little while after her match. “Everybody on tour is a grinder. You see the top players, they run for every ball.”

For Fernandez, the restart began just after the French Open following her three-set loss in the second round, a winnable match against world No 127 Clara Tauson of Denmark. Even as Fernandez and Taylor Townsend cruised into the doubles final at Roland Garros, her father suggested they have a formal sit-down to discuss her future. Her singles ranking was about to drop to 95, her lowest since 2020. 

He told her she could listen to 100 per cent of what he was going to say and finish the season in the top 20, or less than 100 per cent and maybe finish in the top 40.  

“Of course, I didn’t listen to him 100 per cent,” she said. “That comes with maturity and I own up to it.”

Fernandez is back on the up (Kelly Defina/Getty Images)

But she did listen to a lot of what he told her and signed on to his plan to start from scratch with a mini-pre-season in the weeks leading up to Wimbledon, leaving the rackets on the side of the court at times and focusing on her fitness. She had been one of the quickest players in the game but had somehow become slower, or the game had got quicker, with women moving forward more or playing drop shots and taking time away from her.

She needed to be faster for longer and the only way to do that was to build endurance. 

“You kind of see Novak Djokovic every single year, he’s trying to improve something,” Fernandez, who faces the American Alycia Parks in the second round, said. “He changed his whole diet. He started doing yoga. It’s very basic. The fundamentals of an athlete’s body. We wanted to see what can we improve in my fitness because if my fitness level is high and I’m confident with that, my game will follow afterwards.”

Her summer, which included another mini-pre-season after Wimbledon, was up and down, including a first-round loss in the U.S. Open. In September, she was playing qualifying matches, but in October, she won the Hong Kong Open, then made the semi-finals of the Jiangxi Open. 

It’s taken a while, but Fernandez, 21, is finally beginning to experience all the attention and the crowds that have followed her since the 2021 U.S. Open as support rather than pressure. 

“It just took time to understand what was happening,” she said, “to understand what I was feeling and work through that… just find ways to get back to the little girl who would just want to get on court and to hit and hit and have fun and put on a show for everybody.”

Raducanu wants to do that, too. She said she was shocked to see thousands of fans packing the cozy 1573 Arena when she walked onto the court. She tried not to focus on a potential result, which just three matches into her comeback could go either way, and that’s going to have to be her life for now.

“The difference between me losing first round or doing really well at a tournament is really, really slim,” she said. “It’s just in the way that I move, in the way I do things physically. Not being so drastic, I would say, because I know it’s not far away at all. The more I practice consistently, it will come up.”

She lingered long after the win, soaking in the adulation, signing autographs and posing for selfies all around the stadium, her restart officially now underway. Next up for Raducanu is a second round against China’s Yafan Wang. 

“The time away made me very hungry,” Raducanu said. “I’m just happy to be healthy again and pain-free.”

(Top photo: James D Morgan/Getty Images)

Goran Ivanisevic has seen it happen so many times over the past four years. 

His star pupil, Novak Djokovic, shows up to the practice court in a foul mood, griping that his game is a disaster, that he needs to get better… at everything. His serve, his attacking play, even his backhand — one of the great backhands tennis has ever seen — it’s all a mess. 

There is barely any acknowledgement of the resume, the 24 Grand Slam titles, the 74 other tour trophies, and more than 1,000 match victories. He’s got to improve, or he’s cooked.    

“He’s crazy,” Ivanisevic said of Djokovic with a shake of the head, midway through last year, when Djokovic was in the midst of yet another of the greatest seasons any tennis player has ever put together and still whining to his coach at every turn. 

Very good tennis players often express a desire to try to improve, and Djokovic is no different. But it’s one thing to say it, and it’s another thing to actually do it, especially after you’ve reached the pinnacle of the sport, over and over and over. 

In 2015, Djokovic stampeded through perhaps the most ridiculous tennis campaign any man has managed. It’s the season Djokovic often mentions when he is asked to choose the best version of himself. That happens a lot now, since he has rendered the greatest male of all time debate moot — the only person left to compare Djokovic with is Djokovic.

He has won the most Grand Slam singles titles, the most Masters 1,000 titles, which are the next biggest events on the men’s tour, and has spent more weeks (406 and counting) ranked No 1 in the world than anyone else.

He reached all four Grand Slam finals in that 2015 season and won three of them (losing at the French Open to Stan Wawrinka). He went wire-to-wire as the world No 1. He played in 15 consecutive finals and won 11 of them. There was a ‘Big Four’ back then that also included Nadal, Roger Federer and Andy Murray. Djokovic went 15-4 against those three and was 4-0 against Nadal, his top rival. 

Normal behavior after a season like that is to just keep doing what works. Djokovic doesn’t really do normal behavior, and he doesn’t really play tennis today the way he did in 2015, when he defended the court as few others could, then pulled rabbits out of hats, winning so many points he had no business winning. 

That is a far cry from Djokovic’s winning formula last season, the one he will likely use to kickstart his 2024 this month in Australia. All of Djokovic’s best seasons share a theme — they get rolling in January in Australia, where Djokovic is about to try to win an 11th Australian Open men’s singles title. He won his 10th last year, the most in history.

He describes Australia as his “happy place”, a country where he finds his groove, and nothing — not even pulled or torn muscles — can take him out of it. He has not lost a match at the ‘A.O.’ in six years.

“It’s important to have the right start, kind of launch into the rest of the season,” he said during the United Cup, the mixed team competition he played before 2024’s first Grand Slam. “The more you win in a certain tournament, the more comfortable and confident you feel every next time you arrive.”

But Djokovic’s success is about so much more than good karma. It’s about figuring out how to change his game to accommodate his ageing body, which he acknowledges doesn’t move as well as it once did, and to keep up with the evolution of a sport that is now far less friendly to defenders who want to chase balls across the back of the court and pull rabbits out of hats.

With the top players hitting with more power and precision than ever, defending all day, rather than trying to take the initiative and finish points, has become increasingly difficult at the highest level. 

Djokovic has had three truly epic years — 2011, 2015 and 2023. In each of them, he won three Grand Slam finals and armloads of other trophies.

Luckily for us, his last epic season before 2023 happened just after the revolution in advanced tennis analysis, making possible a revelatory deep dive into Djokovic then and now.

The metrics are the byproduct of ball and player tracking data collected through high-speed cameras and analyzed in real-time from technology developed by a British company, TennisViz, and Tennis Data Innovations (T.D.I), a joint venture of the ATP Tour and ATP Media.

These combined efforts have delivered fans, players and coaches information that previous generations could never dream of capturing, showing whether a player is attacking or defending on every shot; the quality of those shots based on the speed, spin, and landing spot; how often they win points they shouldn’t — their so-called steal score; how clinical they are at finishing points they should win; and how often they win the all-important baseline battles that so much of modern tennis has become.

The data tells the story of the evolution of Djokovic, from someone who specialized in winning tennis wars of attrition, to someone who now looks to attack at nearly every opportunity.

In numerical terms, the changes may seem, on the surface, to be incremental, but in a sport that turns on a handful of points in each match, seemingly small changes can result in big differences. Remember, Djokovic has won 14 of his 24 Grand Slam titles since 2015.

It starts with the serve.

Djokovic’s serve is nearly unrecognizable from 2015. Full props on that to Ivanisevic, who possessed a lethal serve in his playing days and has worked tirelessly with Djokovic since 2019, achieving startling results. Djokovic’s first serve averaged 120.1 miles per hour in 2023, compared with 115.4 in 2015.

That’s not about improved racket technology or lighter balls. The tour average has barely budged, rising from 116.1mph to 116.7.

That Djokovic serve is not only faster but also landing in better spots – five centimeters closer to the lines in 2023 than in 2015, and eight centimeters closer to them than the tour average. That’s important no matter what surface he is playing on, but it can be especially potent on the slick, fast ones of Melbourne Park, where serves to the sideline corners slide off the court almost instantly. 

Djokovic has long been one of the great serve returners in tennis history. He’s better at that now, too. His return of his opponent’s second serve landed on the backhand wing on 47 per cent of points in 2023, compared with 39 per cent in 2015, putting him in a far better position to attack. 

Once the points took shape last season, Djokovic seized an attacking position 26 per cent of the time, compared with 21 per cent in 2015. Tennis geeks refer to a player’s ability to win points from an attacking position as the ‘conversion rate’. Last season, Djokovic’s conversion rate was a clinical 72.1 per cent, top in the sport and 3.3 percentage points higher than his conversion rate of 68.8 per cent in 2015. The tour average is 66 per cent. 

How did he become so clinical? His forehand got two miles per hour faster over the past eight years. That helps.

Also, his attacking position was 60 centimeters further into the court than it was in 2015, meaning he is hitting the ball far earlier than he used to, suffocating opponents by stealing split seconds from their recovery and preparation times.

The result of his increasing aggressiveness was a decrease in how much he had to defend, how many balls he had to chase down, and how many rabbits he had to pull out of hats. Tennis geeks refer to that as a player’s ‘steal score’, which is the percentage of points a player wins after being in a defensive position.

As thrilling as it is to claw back a point that appears lost, it’s exhausting and seriously hard on a 36-year-old physique. No one knows that better than Djokovic.

In 2015, Djokovic and Nadal co-led the sport with a steal score of 43.3 per cent. That is kind of crazy to think about — almost half the time their outgunned opponents had Djokovic and Nadal on the run, those poor overmatched souls still lost the point. 

Last season, Djokovic’s steal score was a far less miraculous 36.4 per cent, still above the tour average of 34 per cent and a lot kinder to those 36-year-old knees. In other words, he’s still better than most at making magic happen when he needs to, but he’s become so much more efficient that he’s winning without expending as much energy.

It’s a logical strategy for any ageing great. Federer became more aggressive, and Nadal has tried to as well, coming to the net to finish points when the opportunities are there. But Djokovic has been more successful than both, winning so many of the biggest titles in the sport at this point in his career.

For opponents, there really is only one solution: attack before he attacks, make him run, and force him to play more defensively, the way he did during his previous tennis life.

Easier said than done, of course.

The winning formula has Djokovic setting big goals for 2024. “It’s not a secret that I want to break more records and make more history,” he said. “That’s something that keeps motivating me.”

He wants more Grand Slam titles, an Olympic medal, which has somehow eluded him, a Davis Cup with Serbia. He relishes thrashing the young guns — players two tennis generations removed from him who can’t understand how he has refused to give way. 

Djokovic battled a wrist injury during the United Cup. But anyone banking on that stopping him should remember him winning the Australian Open last year with a seriously injured hamstring that Ivanisevic said would have caused most other players to quit and, in 2021, with a tear in an abdominal muscle.  

“I know what I need to do to maintain my body and mind and spirit in the optimal state to have the opportunity to break records and to go further,” Djokovic said.

He still loves to play tennis, but winning continues to be the primary motivation, especially when he is on the road and away from his family for weeks at a time. 

“That mentality is not changing for 2024 or any next year potentially that I play,” he said.

How he actually plays the game, well, that may be another, ever-evolving story.

Just ask Ivanisevic.

(Top photo: Manan Vatsyayana/AFP via Getty Images)

For months, Rafael Nadal has been trying to temper expectations for his comeback, telling the world that he had little sense of whether he would ever return to his championship form or anything approaching it.

On Sunday, Nadal showed the world why he was so cautious. At 37 years old, he knows how brittle he is and after suffering a slight tear in his muscle at a tuneup tournament in Brisbane, Nadal announced on his social media channels that he was pulling out of the Australian Open.

“Hi all, during my last match in Brisbane I had a small problem on a muscle that as you know made me worried,” Nadal wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Once I got to Melbourne I have had the chance to make an MRI and I have micro tear on a muscle, not in the same part where I had the injury and that’s good news. Right now I am not ready to compete at the maximum level of exigence in five-set matches. I’m flying back to Spain to see my doctor, get some treatment and rest.”

What Nadal hinted at during his few exchanges with the media in Australia and what became crystal clear Sunday is that achieving great results in these first weeks of the season, on hard courts and after being away from the game for nearly a year, was never the priority. Nadal has won the French Open 14 times. He is known as the “King of Clay”. Tennis does not start happening on the red clay he excels on until April. He is intensely focused on being in top form then, not now, and for Roland Garros, which begins in late May, and likely for the Olympics, which will take place at Roland Garros in late July.

“I have worked very hard during the year for this comeback and as I always mentioned my goal is to be at my best level in three months,” Nadal wrote on Sunday. “Within the sad news for me for not being able to play in front of the amazing Melbourne crowds, this is not very bad news and we all remain positive with the evolution for the season. I really wanted to play here in Australia and I have had the chance to play a few matches that made me very happy and positive.”

Whether Nadal’s hip, knees, or chronically injured foot allow him to play is anyone’s guess. Modern tennis, especially the brutally physical brand of it that Nadal plays, is not kind to the ageing athlete. Ask Roger Federer and Andy Murray, or Novak Djokovic, who dedicates so many waking hours to maintaining his health and is battling a niggle in his wrist right now.

But Nadal showed in his three matches in Brisbane that he still knows how to play tennis. Say what you want about his opponents — a faded Dominic Thiem and two middling Aussies, Jason Kubler and Jordan Thompson – there were moments when Nadal looked as slick as ever, especially when he sprinted after drop-shots from deep in the court and pulled off those running, angled flicks that only seem to come out of his hands.

He also lost three match points to Thompson in the second set and had to receive medical attention for discomfort near the hip that doctors surgically repaired last year. After losing the match, Nadal signalled that playing in the year’s first Grand Slam would depend on how he felt the next morning and in the ensuing days. “After a year it is difficult for the body to be playing tournaments at the highest level.”

There’s a glass-half-full view of all this. Had Nadal won those match points, he might have been tempted to play in the semifinal on Saturday and possibly a final on Sunday, risking a more serious injury. He got in three matches and reminded himself that he can play sublime tennis against solid competition, at least for a few sets. Now comes some rest and recovery.

Whatever happens next in terms of his playing schedule, there is now zero doubt where his focus lies — the red clay of Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome and Paris.

What else?

It’s just the opening week of the season, so these tournaments mean nothing.

One of the biggest tournaments of the year, the Australian Open, is just days away, so players have to be in form right now. 

Only in tennis could both of those statements be true. 

After the briefest of “off-seasons”, the Australian Open starts Sunday, January 14, which means hundreds of players were doing what they could during the first days of the year (and the last days of 2023) to prepare. 

Results from the tuneup weeks come with the stock-picker’s warning — past performance is not an indicator of future success. Some top players didn’t compete at all. 

That said, we were watching what was happening in Australia, New Zealand and even Hong Kong. Here are some things that caught our eye.

Novak Djokovic lost a match in Australia. 

It doesn’t happen very much. He’s won the past four Australian Opens that he has played in, and 10 overall, but he fell 6-4, 6-4 to Alex de Minaur of Australia in the United Cup, a mixed-team competition.

The loss isn’t much of a concern. It happens.

But Djokovic is nursing a right wrist injury and received medical attention throughout the United Cup. No one knows how to take care of his body better than Djokovic. He suffered through significant injuries (hamstring and abdominal tears) at his last two Australian Opens and still won. Still, wrist injuries to tennis players can be major red flags, flaring up unpredictably at the worst moments, and there is no way to hide them.

Like Nadal, Naomi Osaka did not forget how to play tennis.

She won a match and lost another in Brisbane, but most importantly she played five tight sets, including two tiebreakers, and gave Karolina Pliskova all she could handle in her first tournament after a year layoff due to injury, struggles with mental health and maternity leave.

Their ball makes a different sound when it comes off Osaka’s racket, a kind of firecracker pop that serves as a quick reminder of why tennis is better when Osaka is playing. And the way she whacks her thigh with her left fist as she gets ready for a big point… if that doesn’t get the juices flowing, it’s hard to say what will.

Iga Swiatek is in a good place. 

Yes, the world No 1 was winning a lot of matches for Poland in the United Cup, often blitzing her opponents in her usual way, but she also seemed lighter, not carrying around that ranking like Atlas trying to hold up the globe.

She even joked about the thing she hates to joke about – “Iga’s Bakery”. That’s the nickname the media has given to all of her 6-0 (bagel) and 6-1 (breadstick) sets. After she and Hubert Hurkacz partnered to beat Spain 6-0, 6-0, she said she would consider hiring Hurkacz as one of her bakers.

Coco Gauff had about as good a start as she could have wanted. 

She headed to Auckland to defend her season-opening title in the ASB Classic. Gauff won the last Grand Slam at the U.S. Open. Starting the season as a Grand Slam champion can mess with the mind. 

Gauff reeled five straight wins, taking 10 of 11 sets, defending her title with a win over Elina Svitolina, healthy once more, thankfully, in the hard-fought final, 6-7 (4), 6-3, 6-3. Gauff was clearly wiped out at the WTA Finals in early November. She skipped the Billie Jean King Cup finals the next week in Spain. After a nice little break, she looked rested and sharp.

She could get a bad draw and lose in the first round of the Australian Open, but she could not have kicked off her season any better. 

Svitolina shut herself down after the U.S. Open with a stress fracture in her ankle.

Returning to competition on hard courts, which aggravated the injury during the summer, is not ideal. But Svitolina appeared to be playing, and winning, without pain in New Zealand. That’s good news.

(Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

Frances Tiafoe took the court for the first time in a while without Wayne Ferreira guiding him. 

Tiafoe and Ferreira parted ways after spending the better part of four seasons together and making the semifinals of the U.S. Open in 2022.

Tiafoe made the top 10 for the first time last year but slipped in the final months of the season and said he was entering 2024 looking to have more fun, play more aggressively, and be less results-focused under the guidance of Diego Moyano.

“A lot of 2023 I was putting a lot of pressure on myself,” he said. “I really wanted to do well. It was really hard for me. Still had a great year, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do in the big events.”

Tiafoe went 1-1 at the Hong Kong Open, losing his quarterfinal match to J.C. Shang of China. 

Which brings us to this: keep an eye on J.C. Shang this season.

He is just 18 years old and already showing off acres of upside. Shang has spent much of his time at the IMG Academy during his tennis life. (IMG once upon a time guided Li Na of China to her groundbreaking career.) He qualified for the Australian Open last year and won a match before losing to Tiafoe. He also qualified for the French Open. 

In addition to beating Tiafoe in Hong Kong, he beat the highly regarded Botic van de Zandschulp. Shang lost to Andrey Rublev, who enjoyed a tip-top first week, in the semifinals.

Again, take those results for what they are — early season wins off veterans trying to find their rhythm – but when teenagers beat seasoned pros it catches the eye.

Emma Raducanu is alive and playing tennis again.

The 2021 U.S. Open champion had triple surgery last spring – two wrists and one ankle. She has set expectations low and is hoping everyone else does, too, since she’s basically starting from scratch, ranked 301st in the world when the year started. 

“I feel reborn,” she said. 

She moved well and crushed some backhands in her opening match, which she won. She was on the verge of winning a second before Svitolina caught her in three sets. 

She will now play in the Australian Open main draw without having to go through qualifying, which might be a curse in disguise. She could probably use the matches and did pretty well the last time she played qualifiers at a Grand Slam at that 2021 U.S. Open. 

Like Nadal though, Raducanu is just hoping to stay healthy. 

(Hannah Peters/Getty Images)

Jelena Ostapenko, the fiery Latvian, hasn’t changed one bit during the break. 

Ostapenko was not happy with a call by the chair umpire Julie Kjendlie during her loss to Victoria Azarenka. 

“You will never be on my match again,” Ostapenko railed at Kjendlie. “You ruin my matches.” 

So on-brand.

A few very big names decided to skip warm-up week altogether.

Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner and Daniil Medvedev are heading into the year’s first Grand Slam without any competitive tuneups. That’s three of the top four men, but also three players who played a ton of tennis last year and in the case of Alcaraz and Sinner, two players who are still trying to figure out how to optimize their schedules. 

Alcaraz also missed the Australian Open last season with a last-minute injury and he certainly did not want that to happen again. 

Sinner reached the finals of the season-ending ATP Finals and then led Italy to the Davis Cup. 

Medvedev, well, he does a lot of unorthodox things when it comes to tennis, like hitting a forehand like someone trying to swat a mosquito in the backseat of a Volkswagen Beetle. 

May it ever be thus.

(Top photo: Chris Hyde/Getty Images)