US Open Day 5: Taylor Dent dazzles the New York Crowd

It's not often that you see two pure serve-volleyers come up against each other at a tournament outside of Wimbledon these days. The night match between Taylor Dent and Ivan Navarro was as traditional as it gets, two players that I consider to play true serve and volley tennis, as a complete package, not only as a means to back up their big serve. Both Dent and Navarro don't have the biggest of serves, or at least they don't really meet the required standard for anyone that's looking to serve and volley these days.

I've always liked watching Taylor Dent's old school style of play. He might be the only active player that I can think of from the top of my head that actually chips and charges regularly. Unfortunately given the match-up he wasn't able to do it today though because Navarro took the net away from him by coming in first.

They really did look like mirror images of each other, Navarro and Dent, right down to their physical appearance which looked scarily similar from far away on TV view. When the match first started, I got a little shocked expecting to see Dent's face when they zoomed in on Navarro after showing him from a distance. Embarrassingly I wondered for a brief moment what Dent had done to his face, before figuring it out a couple of seconds later!

Then I spent almost the entire match trying to find little details here and there that set them apart. The first one is obvious: their service actions but that doesn't really define how a match is played, it's more like a stylistic issue. I've already seen Navarro play before, so I know all about his Novak Djokovic ball-bouncing routine, the whole bending down extremely low to bounce the ball, and the quickness of the ball bounces which have a slight obsessive-compulsive nature to it.

In fact, his whole service action is quick. He basically hits his serve while his ball toss is still on the way up, and the best part about his serve is the slice that he gets on it which makes what would otherwise be a relatively easy serve to return more difficult to control. What gave him so much success in this match was his amazingly high first serve percentage, which somehow stayed in the 80% range the entire match. Any time you reach numbers like that, it's good serving regardless of whether you possess a great serve or not, as long as it's not a three quarter-paced compromised serve.

In terms of pace of serve, Dent easily has Navarro beaten and he does a better job of throwing his whole body weight into the shot, though he also has more to work with in this area. His serve is more of a kicking serve, and his first serve has always been a weapon throughout his career. It was more the consistency of the shot, the double faults at crucial times and low first serve percentages that plagued him, but it was fine in this match.

Although it must be said that neither Dent nor Navarro needed to maintain the standard on serve that you would expect from the higher ranked players. Now this is where their games really started to look like each other's, their approach to their return games. It was the same defensive returning mindset, chipping almost every single return of serve, or at best opting for a short swing blocked return on the forehand.

This is where the top players have a big advantage being able to take a full-blooded swing at any serves that don't meet a certain standard. In fact, they can even do it on the full stretch. There's a certain intimidation factor that comes with being able to hit it back flat and hard straight at the incoming server that wasn't felt here. It took away the challenge of trying to find a good net position in time to make that high putaway volley.

So that gets back to the idea of traditional tennis then, seeing chips, blocked shots and plenty of finesse. Their idea of hitting passing shots was to hit a setup passing shot, a chipped shot low at their opponent's feet then using the weak reply to hit a passing shot into the open court. In the end, in the battle of volleying and passing shots, volleying won more often than not which is what you'd expect given the strengths of the two players.

It might have worked against other players, but both Navarro and Dent are too technically sound with their volleys to be bothered about digging out shots below the height of the net. They both had a knack of making the moderately difficult look easy, and almost always found the open court when it was there to hit into. Dent has slightly more flair, more keen to use the drop volleys and short volleys whereas Navarro played a more straight-forward style of hitting the high percentage volley into the open court.

What I most enjoy about watching the expert volleyers is seeing a volley punched away with conviction, seeing it skid low on the court and cut away from the opponent at impact. In my opinion, it's the sign of a good volleyer. At first, I thought Navarro was lacking slightly in this department, focusing more on accuracy than penetration but after the loss of the first set, his volleys improved to the point where it wasn't noticeable anymore and he hit some amazing volleys under pressure in the fifth set, despite ending up on the losing end of the match. In fact, his consistency was quite impressive for such an unheralded player, always bending down low for the volleys when he needed to, which not a whole lot of other players manage.

But like most matches, it's the weaknesses that end up being the decisive factor in matches and it was Taylor Dent's passing shots in the fourth and fifth sets that allowed him to break serve and win the fifth set tie-break. Out of the two players, he was easily the better shotmaker from the back of the court, more capable of hitting flashy groundstroke winners due to sheer pace especially off the backhand. From what I could remember, almost all of Dent's impressive groundstroke winners came from the backhand.

He almost threw away the advantage he created for himself at match point in the fifth set tie-break with an easy forehand volley missed, but he recovered quickly to maintain his level and finish the match with a slice backhand return winner. The atmosphere on Grandstand in the final set tie-break was quite spectacular. Incidentally that was when I switched streams due to some ill-timed technical problems, and just when I was about to comment on the strangely subdued atmosphere, it seemed electric on a different feed with better sound effects. I'm thoroughly confused but Dent sure seemed to enjoy and appreciate it himself which is what matters.

It was quite a sight seeing Dent's victory celebration, in what must have surely been the highlight of his return judging by his reaction. It's his first five set win since his return, after two five set losses in the opening round of the Australian Open and Wimbledon. In his post-match celebration, Dent grabbed the microphone from the umpire's chair and thanked the crowd for their support, then went on to high-five some crowd members sitting at the front.