
Cilic hasn’t had a good last 12 months after a maiden semi-final appearance at the Australian Open last year and cracking the top 10. He was also awful against Florian Mayer last week. Keeping in mind that I would possibly do a piece on him after this match, I took a closer look at his overall game.
Outwardly it looked similar to the way it always did, except a more unspectacular version of it. The same kind of low intensity game based on ball-striking and accuracy (though not so much on accuracy anymore). He was particularly passive to begin with, mainly focusing on getting the ball into the court. It took a while before he took it up another notch, taking the ball earlier on some of the shorter balls and hitting with better depth. It was good that he did that on occasion otherwise I would have thought he was warming up.
He comes across as so workmanlike that I’m not even sure if he likes playing tennis. I just assume he does, because he made it this far and apparently players in Croatia are harder working than the Brits for example because they had a tougher time growing up. That means there is more benefit for them to be successful.
His game was always lacking spark though. He’d change directions so smoothly that it just looked like he was casually rallying with his opponent. He relied so much on timing. His winners don’t catch the eye as much as Melzer’s winners do on a better day. You have to look closer. Melzer had some eye-catching errors today though. This season, he’s been confidently swinging away on his groundstrokes regardless of whether he’s been playing well or not. He’s been making a lot of rash errors. He hit a forehand that was out wide today by the equivalent of half the width of the court, timed in the middle of the strings. I suppose that’s proof he was trying to hit all kinds of shots that he wasn’t prepared for, in terms of footwork.

He was probably already in a bad mood to begin with though. The match had barely started and Melzer asked the umpire a couple of times to get the people to talk more quietly, especially those sitting near the court. A quick camera shot of the stadium shows that the stadium was reasonably empty. Melzer is known for finding every little thing that goes on externally annoying.
Sometimes Cilic’s calm approach gives him a disadvantage against more inspired players, but today it was surely the better approach. Some might say it is just a personality difference, but I’m pretty sure that playing with a relaxed demeanor would affect the way you move around the court, and the energy around the footwork as well. Then again, to put in a more simplistic manner, he was the more solid of the two players and was subsequently rewarded. He also won plenty of free points on his serve.
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