Tennisnowornever

Lesson #5 The game is in flux! Okay, so, a little contradictory? I know: I’m just after implying that the matches at this year’s French Open were more predictable than normal and I stand by it! In terms of outcome that is. As I said, it appeared that identifying which player was physically stronger often answered the question of who would win. So if we could guess the result then what do I mean by ‘the game is in flux’? Well firstly let us think back on some of the score lines from the tournament. While it is true that the winner was often predictable the manner in which they got there was so often not. The Halep vs Svitolina encounter was always going to be a tight one. Hence, the fact Svitolina stretched her to 3 sets was pretty regular. But if anyone foresaw the demolition that would follow in the decider then I would like to congratulate you and maybe even employ you to write these for me! The momentum was so obviously with Svitolina….so how come Halep took it 6-0?? She ...

Lesson #4 Power play is in vogue, but will that work on grass? If there was one thing that particularly struck me from this year’s French Open it was how clearly style of play influenced the outcome of so many matches. Of course, this is always the case. Federer has a grass court game as obviously does Sergei Stakhovsky, Marcus Willis, Johanna Konta etc. That doesn’t mean they are not capable of winning on clay (and vice versa: King of clay Nadal has won Wimbledon) but it is evidently a more natural fit for someone like Rafa or Fabio Fognini So why did this concept come as such a surprise to me? After all, Roland Garros has a reputation as being the most physically draining of all the slams and clay is a surface famously hard to adapt to if you have not been brought up playing on it. It takes time to develop an understanding of how to win on it and many of the all-time greats of tennis such as John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, Boris Becker and Martina Hingis failed to ever lift the c...

So dear tennis fans, you semi-postponed your life for a whole 2 weeks to immerse yourselves fully in what we know is one of the four most important events of the year. Personal hygiene and social life may have suffered but was it was worth it? Well, perhaps your answer depends partially on which players you were supporting but I assure you that whether you were happy with the results or not this tournament was an eye opener on many levels. With Wimbledon just around the corner, over the next few days I am going to roundup the 5 main knowledge nuggets we can extract from the French Open 2017 and, more importantly, what they mean heading into the grass courts: Lesson #1 The changing of the guard is coming… Tennis is a sport always looking to the future, even if sometimes prematurely. My first recollection of hearing about the impending ‘changing of the guard’ was probably in 2012 into 13. It was a year in which BBC commentators seemed to talk about nothing but the inevitable fall...