Career Adjustments (and Miami)

Usually on the first day of a Masters event, I tend to focus on the lower profile players, before they make their exit out of a tournament. Sometimes I make that choice just for the sake of watching a more competitive match, with more emotional ups and downs.

For a change, I took a glimpse at the early rounds of Roger Federer, Andy Roddick and Rafael Nadal, though for different reasons in each of these matches. I was already aware of Roddick losing, so I approached the match with a different perspective than I would have otherwise.

When you watch a top ranked player play, there are more clear expectations. It's also easier to observe because as soon as anything happens outside of what is expected, you can more easily compliment the underdog, or criticise the top player. This, you see on message boards frequently. Whereas with a player with a broader range of performances, almost anything can go under the expected category, though some people use this word in hindsight as a form of implying how great their tennis knowledge is.

In the early stages of Federer's match against Radek Stepanek, I was curious as to what kind of tricks Stepanek would have up his sleeve against Federer. The word 'tricks' is an appropriate term here because whatever he tried was obviously something he couldn't maintain. It was more like a show. In the second rally of the match, Stepanek half-volleyed a return of serve, charged to the net then showed off his excellent anticipation and volleying skills by somehow staying in the exchange with three more volleys. Then he ran back to retrieve a lob and dumped it into the net.

It's not often you see volleys go beyond a couple of strokes, and there's good reason for that. Because it rarely has a high winning percentage for the volleyer. Stepanek lost many points at the net, but there were some entertaining exchanges. Stepanek tried to bluff his way through the match, and naturally it didn't work. As if he would be able to throw off Federer's rhythm without having anything substantial to back it up.

Whenever he returned a couple of volleys, it was impressive, but he was rarely going to win them. From the baseline, he tried to half-volley and finesse shots into accurate positions but he never had enough power. His forehand was often mistimed and dumped into the net. I'm looking up photos of Stepanek to match my article, and almost every photo is of him stretching out to return a shot which seems indicative of this match. He is quite athletic.

Both players won many cheap points. In between some entertaining exchanges, there were a lot of short points and free points. That's exactly the way Federer likes it these days. Even when they exchanged longer rallies, they were half-volleying so often that the point finished in the blink of an eye. It was such a contrast to the Roddick vs Cuevas match, where both players comfortably waited until the ball would reach its peak height.

Federer only required a couple of shots to force Stepanek into a defensive position, and to finish it off. Apparently he hits the ball harder these days, according to a statistic that I heard from a commentator a while ago. Watching this match, and then moving onto the Roddick match, it did make me wonder what kind of adjustments Roddick will make as his career reaches its latter stages. He's reaching the age of 28 now, turning 29 this year and he might even be engaging in longer rallies than he used to. He also hit a famous diving winner on match point in Memphis, which revealed just as much his age as well as his fitness.

In his match against Pablo Cuevas, what I could see was Roddick trying to play incredibly smart tennis. It wasn't like he was hitting the ball into the middle of the court at all. With the slow pace of the match, sometimes I felt like I could get a glimpse into his thought process. I don't actually think he was playing smart tennis. It occurred every now and then rather than on a consistent basis. He was thinking too much.

In the first game, he ran around his backhand to hit a series of heavy forehands which would have been effective if he had his weight going the right way. That was a good reference point for later in the match, because he stopped doing that relatively quickly and ended up trading backhands. Much of that was due to illness though. Roddick really started to struggle in the second set, putting in a lacklustre performance and taking an injury time-out.

Cuevas was hitting his backhand well, but his forehand was quite inconsistent. I wasn't fully convinced of his performance, but one thing he did better than Roddick in particular was using the full width of the court. It didn't seem like a big difference until three shots later, when Roddick would end up having too much court to cover to have any chance of changing defense to offense.

Cuevas' crosscourt backhand is clearly one of his strengths. It's difficult to return the top spin when it bounces up high and deep, and he can also generate good angles. The kick serve on the ad court also works a lot better than it does on the deuce court. He's just naturally better on the backhand side.