WIMBLEDON 2019

Doubt it, Fed has said he wants to be around for Tokyo Olympics.

And he likely will if he keeps playing like this!

has fed ever lost a final from up champ pt before

i understand djokovic haters but he is just so good, cant hate him

Not Slams. But he lost to Del Potro from MP up in Indian Wells F last year. Also Nadal in Rome F 2006. And Novak has done him at least twice now. Not finals though (USO sf once or twice and possibly Paris Masters sf last year - 76 57 76).

And he likely will if he keeps playing like this!

yeah!

I didn't hate Djokovic but his continued public support of Justin Gimelstob is unconscionable and a huge reason why men's tennis is a mess rn. Andy Murray he is not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/05/sports/novak-djokovic-atp-player-council.html

he's just so deeply unlikeable to watch. in everything. even those stupid uniqlo ads.

i can hate him

someone should ask fed in this press conf if he is pro/con/indifferent to the 12-12 tiebreak rule

& he said "it is what it is" ok

the gimelstob affair is unfortunate but tbh just seems like a convenient excuse for people who've always hated him regardless

it smacks of generic eastern european bias imho

My dislike of him was compounded by the Becker connection, who I hated more than anyone who has ever played the game.

Give him his due, he may have dips in intensity and focus in matches but seemingly never when it really matters. Fed’s winner-UE diff was +32, Nole’s was +2. How on earth, I blame the electoral college, etc etc

1 could say that fed wins this match vs any other man in history

he's for people who thought Sampras was the ultimate in charisma black holes.

Also the 12-12 t/b thing - ok in the sense it keeps the tournament moving, prevents players being spent for the next round because they had to toil for six hours plus, but I think they should have suspended it for the final(s). These guys are doing nothing until August and there’s a roof.

I really didn't see the need for that change at all. And Novak was cynically playing for the TB whereas Fed was really going for the break on the 5th (The only come back would be that this match would lenghten out what was the longest final ever even further).

Watching the highlights late last night I was reflecting on why Djoko so confident of winning the breakers against a man who isn't bad at anything to do with the goings on in a tennis and that got me to armchair-thinking of what you have to do to get to this level at his age. The management of it, my assumption that Fed plays a lot less (and its here that someone who follows the ATP tour all year around can fill in the gaps) to get to slams in that competetive shape that can last out for two weeks...but one which also leads to a severe lack of sharpness at the moments that decide the matches in a close contest. The edge that perhaps only be ironed out through volume of matches. But maybe idk Novak plays a similar volume of matches throughout the year and is bringing the confidence of winning multiple slams recently.

Like, this would not matter at all - one player in grass can get anywhere near Fed's level to find that out. One or two other players in clay lay out those lack of edges in Fed for us to see. Just yet another layer to Fed's incredible accomplishments. To do all this with slightly younger greats like Nadal and Djoko. And Djoko will almost certainly only surpass his slam total because absolutely no one seems to be coming through apart from Thiem who has made two slam finals - and this is on clay.

This is a good piece on Djokovic that maybe gets close to why he's so mentally tough, a willingness to win ugly: https://www.theringer.com/2019/7/14/20693870/novak-djokovic-roger-federer-wimbledon-final-2019

Anyway, I kind of think Fed will win the US Open now. He's been quietly doing well all year, and apart from his RG blowout to Nadal, all his other losses in 2019 have been to in-form players in extremely tight matches. He's taken those losses maybe a little too well, and it cost him yesterday's title. He won't want to repeat those mistakes again.

Good piece, the para laying out all the stats from the match is pretty heartbreaking. I think the gap in it though is to ask where has Fed's ability to close out slams, after winning 20 of them, gone. Fed has always had that adulation from crowds and has coped perfectly well before.

and maybe what's missing is the thing you can do only when younger -- i.e. you can play as many matches, win the smaller titles, as a way of preparing for the bigger ones. Then again Novak is ridiculous on the big points too.

Since he last won a Slam (which was only 18 months ago), Fed has... lost from two sets and MP up vs Anderson, lost a tight four-setter under lights in insane humidity vs Millman, lost a tight four-setter in which he missed dozens of break-points vs Tsitsipas, and been thumped in straights (in which he actually played fleetingly well) on clay by Rafa. And then yesterday. Four of those five Slam exits seem like "old man loses edge" but I think the Federer of 2013 would have lost all of those matches too, maybe not even competitively. Meanwhile, he's sailing through most other rounds and continuing to win at 1000/500/250 level. I think the reduction of schedule (and Edberg's 2014-15 retooling of his game, the new racket, etc) is giving him chances he wouldn't have had at this age to go deep in these events.

And, what's more, he hasn't even played a light schedule in 2019! 43 matches (47 if you count Hopman Cup) by the middle of July is maybe more than anyone else on the main tour. It's more than he played at this point at his peak in 2007.

At 8-7 40/15 all I could think about was those US Open semis. It had to be an another ace or nothing. Novak was going to find a way to get out of it. Fed net-rushing on that nothing FH at 40/30 was disastrous. Those BPs at 11-11 were Fed's last chance. Knew how the t-b would go.

The article above is very good - nails it pretty well.

I wonder if Roddick took a little sour delight in this. He outplayed Fed for long stretches in 2009, lost a couple of tie-breaks and eventually gave it up in a marathon fifth on a frame mis-hit. I guess that was a feature of Fed Slam finals in his 20-something pomp - he *always* won the breakers.

Thanks for the additional info - quite fascinating seeing all of these tight losses...and if he is doing that against Anderson then he will do it against Djoko.

That approach at 40/30 was...yeah, waking up in the middle of the night sweating and screaming stuff. How can you work yourself into that position and do this when you get to it? idk, and maybe nobody else does.

I'd say 18 months is a big-ish gap from winning one slam to another. In most individual sports when a 'great' starts winning the big ones they just stack 'em in batches. Seems like a habit that once broken is hard to get back on.

Gotta say I am not sure about Djoko hate as portrayed in that article. Novak is more hated than Nadal? If it wasn't for an injury or two Fed might have never won the French Open, surely a bigger crime than the tantrums and Grass-eating (The gimelstob affair is more recent, as grooveman says). Bringing in the Kyrgios tweet is funny but part of you is thinking the guy is sitting at home writing that shit instead of troubling anyone in the last stages of a slam.

Maybe there is something to anti-Eastern European (and Russian) bias. That little corner of the world is piling up slams across women and men's games. Maybe there is a correlation between the hate Novak gets and Lendl did? Novak has double the number of slams tho'.

eh insanely successful people who are also desperately needy are easy to dislike. not much more complicated than that. also the stupid number of ball bounces before serving that he did in the early bit of his career.

lendl was great and still wish he had a wimbledon rather than pat cash

No-one seriously thinks this about 'anti-Eastern Europe' bias, do they?

Goran was adored, late in his career at least. Safin hugely popular. Can't claim to be too well up on WTA crowd popularity, but I think Ivanovic, Jankovic and Azarenka were all pretty well liked? Halep and Pliskova are too.

To name but seven of the legion of popular Eastern European players over the years - especially in the women's game.

Personally, always rooted for Lendl, Mecir, Korda, Mandlikova, Myskina, Zvereva...

No-one seriously thinks this about 'anti-Eastern Europe' bias, do they?

― Orpheus Knutt (Tom D.), Monday, 15 July 2019 bookmarkflaglink

grooveman was saying it upthread. Then I thought of Lendl as a near analogue of someone who was very successful from that part of the world, and I remember reading something about how Lendl wasn't liked very much. But I wasn't around for him (or Navratilova)

Lendl was pretty dour, he was never going to be a crowd favourite, no matter where he came from

Lendl was my first favourite and while I was still young it was pretty clear he wasn't the one most people were rooting for/people though you should root for. I'd not go as far as to throw it down to anti-EEU bias, though I'm not into tennis deep enough to say anything about that.

Good read on the Ringer about Djokovic though.

Weirdly, Novak *was* a crowd favourite early in his career. He used to do a bit of a Tony Virgo and impersonate other players, was generally regarded as a "personality". I think he managed to trash a lot of goodwill in one on-court interview at Flushing Meadow after beating Roddick; Roddick had been poking fun in pressers re: ND's habit (back then, pre-GF diet*) of retiring from matches or citing injuries, and ND had a bit of a go back. Cue entirely predictable booing and I'm not sure his public persona ever quite recovered.

(* - he attributed his miraculous improvement in stamina 2010-11 to eliminating gluten from his diet, which is a small part of the general BS that seems to surround him).

He used to do a bit of a Tony Virgo

WHERE'S THAT SLICE BALL GOING

Actual LOL

when you say Tony Virgo you, of course, mean John Meo.

Gaaah! I knew it wasn't right when I posted it.

:D

This, from the Ringer, rings (npi) true most of all:

"This is, in essence, the whole tragedy of Djokovic. He arrived either a little too early or a little too late in the Federer-Nadal screenplay—too late to seem like an equal partner in the story, too early for the story to have ended without him—and as a result has always felt weirdly extraneous, even as he’s won 16 majors and been the best player in the world for most of the last 10 years."

Novak is more hated than Nadal?

Yes. There were as many "Vamos Rafa"s as there were "Come on Roger"s during their semi, but the final was a completely one-sided affair. Like Michael pointed out, Djokovic was much more loved by the public when he was just starting to win Slams - all those funny press conferences, the Sharapova impressions, the Djoker nickname. I guess that kind of thing just stopped being cute once he started really threatening the Roger-Rafa duopoly (The Ringer otm). Djokovic is not my fave for various reasons, but purely tennis-wise I'd prob still root for him over Rafa.

and re Federer: This is just my personal impression but I get the sense that since 2016, post-knee surgery and back problems, Fed has been treating his career basically like an extended farewell tour - happy to play on as long as he remains healthy, not putting pressure on himself, not sweating the small stuff. This has translated to breezing past the losses and not really doing anything to fix the late-stage mental lapses: like, even if he doesn't win, it's all good as long as he's still making semis and finals.

Yesterday was the first time in a very long time that I felt that he really, really wanted to win but couldn't, simply because he hadn't bothered to really look at himself and see how he's been reacting in these tight situations. And it's weird given how good he's been at analysing his own game in the past and fixing what needed to be fixed (adding the dropshot which he used to hate, coming in to the net more often, beefing up his backhand). Yesterday's loss was probably a good wake up call for him - it's no use having all the tools in his repertoire if he can't bring it during the most important moments in a match.

This, from the Ringer, rings (npi) true most of all:

"This is, in essence, the whole tragedy of Djokovic. He arrived either a little too early or a little too late in the Federer-Nadal screenplay—too late to seem like an equal partner in the story, too early for the story to have ended without him—and as a result has always felt weirdly extraneous, even as he’s won 16 majors and been the best player in the world for most of the last 10 years."
― Le Bateau Ivre, Monday, July 15, 2019 8:58 AM (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't follow tennis super duper closely but this feels correct. Honestly I think a lot of the anti-Djokovic sentiment is a function of everyone's love for Fed. Novak is a real threat now to surpass Fed's record for majors and I think the average fan doesn't want to see that happen. Kind of like a low-grade version of Bonds passing Aaron on the HR list (actually maybe a better example is Jimmie Johnson trying to overtake Earnhardt and Petty for NASCAR titles. there are probably other better examples I'm forgetting too).

Any examples that someone outside the US might understand?

well shit, I guess NASCAR isn't the global phenomenon I thought it was.

Federer singles record, since his return from injury at start of 2017 (incl Hopman and Laver Cups): 152-21 (87.9% W/L, 14 titles (18 if you include the SUI/Europe team titles)). Of those 21 defeats, 7 have been from match point up (Donskoy, Haas, Del Potro, Kokkinakis, Anderson, Thiem, Djokovic). You can probably throw another couple of squeakers in there (Djokovic, Paris Masters sf 2018, when he never lost serve; Thiem, Indian Wells f 2019, when he was coasting up a set + break). Maybe not counting the Slam exits vs Millman/Tsitsipas as they didn't go five (though Fed had a bunch of chances). OTOH, I think Fed has got out of jail maybe 12 times in this period (down mp vs Monfils, Kyrgios twice, tight matches vs Coric, Wawrinka, Berdych, that AO final vs Nadal, etc).

My suspicion is that, in the small subset of total matches which really go down to the wire, Novak is rather better than Fed's approx 12-9 recent record. Maybe not.