Robin Soderling Smashes Through The Draw to Win Brisbane

Last time Robin Soderling arrived in Brisbane, he was a top 20 player with a relatively low profile due to his less-than-impressive Grand Slam achievements. This year he returned as the #1 seed, and top 5 player, commanding the majority of the media attention in the tournament here. In fact, a couple of days ago, he featured in a video clip where one of the interviewers who barely knows how to play tennis tried to play against him, and he switched to playing left-handed.

Soderling is clearly a player to be feared now, rather intimidating and scary to play against. It’s hard to write about Soderling’s tennis abilities compared to the rest of the field. Is it less complimentary to write about a player’s ability to generate pace? He does hit quite a heavy ball too though. Is it mostly due to his big and strong stature, or the crazy big wind-up on the forehand? A couple of years ago, he was often criticised for the unreliability on the forehand side, but now it seems like that unorthodox style isn’t so bad after all. In fact, it’s his “money shot”.

The other big shot of his would be the serve, which seems to zip through the court before you’ve even seen it coming. During the commentary yesterday, I heard one of the most fascinating observations about Soderling. They said his serve is quite flat, and he can’t swing it out away from his opponents that well. So if there’s a big point, he always hits his favourite flat serve down the T on the deuce court, and out wide on the ad court.

Soderling defeated Andy Roddick in the final today, rather convincingly. It was similar to his win over Radek Stepanek in the previous round, where both players tried to throw Soderling off his rhythm (though in different ways), but found that their off-pace shots had very little effect.

As with many of Roddick’s matches (with opponents trying to target his backhand), there were many rallies on the backhand crosscourt side of the court, and Soderling seemed like far more of a dangerous player in this match-up. Able to run around and hit more forehands, penetrating and with surprisingly good angle.

With so many opportunities to hit off-forehands, it was easy to see how Soderling has much improved his footwork running around his backhand to hit forehands. Before he sets up to hit the shot, he throws his entire body into the shot, and this requires a lot of work, to make sure that everything is set up facing the right angle and on time. It’s always hard work on Soderling’s end, but it looks like he’s physically and mentally up to the task. It sure helped that he knew Roddick didn’t have much to hurt him with. He doesn’t seem to be using the backhand down-the-line as much as he used to during the best moments of his career.

I’d like to know what vision Larry Stefanki has for this period of Roddick’s career. Our commentators here in Australia have now painted him as a junkballer, beating his opponents by throwing off their game with off-pace shots. I wonder if this is what he thinks of himself. He has been using the slice backhand a lot, which seems to be one of Larry Stefanki’s favourite shots, when you look at how he handled Fernando Gonzalez’s game, and probably some others, not that I paid attention to his previous coaching roles. Is he developing his game in a direction of producing moderately high performances, but underwhelming results?

Roddick must not be using enough forward momentum on his groundstrokes. I had a look at his forehand, and he’d throw himself into it trying to get as much racquet head speed as possible on the forehand but by the time it reached the other side of the net it always looked underwhelming. So much effort to generate power, such little reward. I don’t think this is normally the case but he was being outplayed here, so he tried harder to penetrate through the court, and still ended up with 0 forehand winners by the end of the match.

There must be something technically wrong there, or either he is intentionally trying to hit these loopy, safe shots. At least his accuracy and consistency is quite good, and this will always ensure he can beat the majority of players ranked below him.

Frustrated with not having any control over proceedings in this final, Roddick used the entire rain delay to rant to the umpire Fergus Murphy about his way of checking whether the court was suitable for play or not. I thought the rant was rather rude and self-centered, and also annoyingly repetitive. In any case, Soderling continued in a business-like manner unfazed by all the distractions and broke serve soon afterwards giving him the crucial break to finish off the match.