Big hitting and big serving: Soderling and Federer advance to the finals in similar style

Is there some kind of significance of yesterday’s French Open men’s semi-finals? The line-up consisted of Robin Soderling, Fernando Gonzalez, Juan Martin Del Potro and Roger Federer. Players that all have the ability to generate their own pace, and create winners from the back of the court combined with a lot of cheap points on serve.

Clay has always been thought of as a surface that neutralises the serve the most, but it’s turned out to be more of a factor than it has in previous years. It’s no wonder that Davydenko felt completely hopeless in his blowout loss to Soderling, whereas Gonzalez was able to hold onto his serve and take his opportunities late in the third and fourth sets, waiting for Soderling to briefly flinch to take the sets.

It’s not like we’re seeing an exhibition of aces, but one thing that an effective serve does is put the point firmly in favour of the server. Setting up the point with a big forehand, and on clay, once you get pinned back on the defense, it’s harder to instantly counterattack, it requires a lot of hard work. But when you come up against big hitters that can do more with one shot than most like Soderling, Del Potro, Federer and Gonzalez have recently shown, it becomes almost impossible.

In the case of Soderling and Del Potro, interestingly their defensive skills come up short when compared to some of their peers but they make up for it in other ways. It’s not as impressive as the athleticism of a Djokovic or Davydenko, but they seem to have this ability to give the ball a good slap on the stretch making use of their great reach and ability to generate power. Restricting the ability of their opponents to yank them around the court too much, and if all else fails, then they’d look for a way out of the point, with a low percentage shot. Reinforcing that they’re the one in control of points, not their opponents.

It was an interesting match-up, Soderling having the clear advantage on the backhand wing, dangerous off both sides, but Gonzalez being the significantly better athlete, often winning points through sheer determination, sometimes just looking to get one ball back on a point that seemed already lost – but finally drawing the error on the final shot. And that’s something to admire, when you consider how Gonzalez normally wins his matches, through outright attacking. When he first stepped out on court, that’s how he expected to win. But he found the balls coming back too quickly, and shanking and mistiming balls trying to create big swings off shots where he had no right to. So he adjusted his game and started to dig more balls out, prolong points any way he could and throw in as much variety as he could.

Despite Gonzalez’s reputation as a big hitter, I think of him as being a good thinker on the court as well at times, at least at this stage in his career, and I’ve seen him in the past expose many players with short wide balls, slices and dropshots. But I think based on this match and Del Potro’s match, slice backhands don’t penetrate as much through the court, creating this higher bounce that doesn’t bother their opponents as much. And I guess Gonzalez needs to have that additional variety on his backhand, kind of like how Andy Roddick has developed his to a lesser extent to make up for his lack of shotmaking ability on that side.

Soderling had been winning the majority of his matches on the back of his strong forehand, the initial shot that takes his opponents off-balance but he was equally as lethal on the backhand yesterday. His crosscourt backhand is like a smothering shot, so penetrating and deep that he doesn’t need to achieve any exceptional accuracy on it to cause damage on it. It’s particularly useful coming up against Gonzalez, who could not find his way around to a forehand, and is nowhere near as threatening when restricted to a backhand. But the shot that I was most surprised with was the effectiveness of Soderling’s down-the-line backhand. How he managed to on so many occasions, on the return of serve with Gonzalez’s serve breaking away wide on the ad court, step in and change directions with ease for a winner.

In the end, what it came down to was that when both players were trading blows with each other, toe-to-toe, that Soderling was the better player. It looked like Gonzalez was on his way for getting rewarded for his efforts, as Soderling started to leak more errors and lack the sting on his groundstrokes that he had maintained earlier allowing Gonzalez to control more points with his forehand. Soderling couldn’t maintain the hitting from the first two sets, so what he did instead was save his final reserves for a final couple of launched attacks at Gonzalez.

The first one was in the first game of the fourth set, but Gonzalez rose to the challenge, and that seemed to knock the belief out of Soderling. He went through frustration and despair at the thought of the match slipping out of his hands, then finally he started to feel some kind of freedom again after being down a break in the fifth set. He started going for his shots again at full throttle, and pulled them off. Then once he achieved that initial break back, it was like he was revitalised again, rediscovering the same devastating pace that he had on his groundstrokes in the first two sets to convincingly win the decisive fifth set.

It was an exciting, and entertaining semi-finals day in Roland Garros, two high quality five-set matches that were underlined with incredible fighting spirit from all four players. Juan Martin Del Potro in the past hasn’t had much success against Roger Federer, having failed to take a set, making this five-set performance all the more impressive. There is no doubt that Del Potro is becoming one of the fastest improvers on the tour, seemingly addressing every criticism coming his way.

Now everyone knows that Del Potro has improved his serve leaps and bounds ever since the beginning of that well-documented four title run. But when did it become such a big weapon, the ability to win all those cheap points? It used to be more of a consistently powerful stroke, very good but not brilliant the way it was against Federer.

Then there’s the development of Del Potro’s forward movement, taking advantage of his shots at the net. And maybe the claycourt season has been perfect for him to develop this kind of extra layer to his game, given that it can sometimes be incredibly difficult to completely finish off shots from the back of the court on this surface. But also incredibly tiring if you choose to do so. It has always been thought that Del Potro didn’t need to possess great volleys to finish off some of his shots, but simply that he needed to make his way up there. Though it must be said that he is very reliable and solid up there, and seems to know where to position his racquet in order to make his volleys as simple as possible.

But aside from that monster serving performance, what really put Del Potro in a winning position was through the strength of his groundstrokes, which seemed heavier and consistently more penetrating than Federer’s. Federer didn’t seem to do anything wrong specifically, and he didn’t crumble on the big points like he did against Haas a couple of rounds earlier. He was simply not given much opportunity to do as much with the ball as he’d like to. Though at times, it was rather incredible what Federer could come up with on the half-volley.

Just like in the Soderling vs Gonzalez semi-final, it was interesting how much of an impact that the extra bit of pace that Del Potro was able to generate on his groundstrokes, had on the match. Tennis is a game of cause and effect, how hitting a shot slightly harder or deeper prevents your opponent from attacking. Or how missing one or more first serves can get you into trouble, and that’s what happened here. To be fair, it was a rather steep decline on Del Potro’s end though, as he started to wear out physically from the start of the fourth set onwards. But it was interesting how the options started to open up for Federer with that additional time to set up, able to implement more touch shots, more variety and control the points better.

This sets up for what could potentially be an entertaining, hard-fought battle, but there are no guarantees. We’ve seen what Del Potro did to Federer, and Soderling has the ability to implement the same game, except with even more force than what Del Potro did.