Rafa Rolls On

We’re on week two of the Rafa watch. Can Rafael Nadal win four clay court tournaments in four weeks including three Masters Series events and then, two weeks later, win another Roland Garros? So far so good. In the Barcelona final he did lose his first set on clay this year but it didn’t stop him from beating David Ferrer 6-1, 4-6, 6-1.

There was nothing Ferrer could do about Rafa’s play in the first set and the score reflected that, but Ferrer got back into the match by going into attack mode in the second set and he broke Rafa right away. Ferrer was aiming for the lines to get Rafa out of position then trying to finish off the points at the net.

There’s a limit to this approach and our reader Pepe directed me to an excellent article by Cheryl Murray which discusses this very subject. The article is titled “What Monte Carlo’s final means” and it describes what happened to Roger Federer after he went up 4-0 in the second set of that final.

As Murray sees it, Roger caught Rafa off guard with his aggressiveness and, in fact, caught us all off guard. We’ve been asking him to attack for so long and here, finally, was our reward. Roger was dominating in the second set and was up 4-0 when Rafa started cashing in on his passing shots and it became clear that attacking the net would not work by itself. As Murray said:

As it turns out, the “winning strategy” did not supply what it promised – the win. Federer obviously sensed that a highly aggressive game against the Spaniard would not work for long, which is most likely why he had not tried it before Sunday.

In my post on Friday, I mentioned an ESPN column by Joel Drucker who suggested that Roger’s coach, Jose Higueras, would encourage Roger to hit a low lying slice off Rafa’s high ball to his backhand. I couldn’t remember seeing that slice in the Monte Carlo final and Pepe verified that Roger didn’t do it.

The slice makes sense, though. A slice makes it hard for Rafa to hit with pace and it could bring him to the net against his will – in other words draw him forward without the benefit of a good approach shot. Nadal is no slouch at the net but he certainly can’t control the match from there as well as he can from the baseline.

If an attacking game isn’t enough, then, how about a combo with the attacker, the angler, and the slice? Roger was hitting a sharply angled backhand cross court that was successfully pulling Nadal out of the court in Monte Carlo.

There are some difficulties with the combination. The more things Roger tries to do, the more errors he’ll make, and it’ll start to affect the rest of his game. For instance, maybe his serve will be less sharp because the more complex the game plan is, the harder it is to execute it. Roger would be trying to throw off Rafa’s game without throwing off his own game. Not easy.

Back to match at hand. Ferrer kept up his level of play and was serving at 4-3 in the second set when the tide looked like it would turn. Ferrer was up 40-0 and attacking like crazy but Rafa was getting everything back. Rafa finally managed to break Ferrer and get back on serve. Ferrer then broke Rafa one more time and served out to take the second set but that was it: Ferrer lost the first five games of the third set and only won one more game.

At the end of Murray’s article, she suggest that we owe Rafa an apology for thinking that all he has to do is hit a lot of big forehands and run down every ball to win a match, thus implying that he doesn’t think well enough to strategize his way through a match.

Rafa can decode his opponent’s game and make adjustments because clearly he had an answer for everything Roger threw at him in Monte Carlo. But I would say that his mental and physical strength are more important that his strategical skills. His focus and consistency are unparalleled and David Ferrer is the fifth ranked player in the world and a Spanish clay court player to boot and he could not keep up with Rafa. After expending all that energy to win the second set, he tired out.

The only way to beat Rafa is to shorten the points and Roger has the best chance of doing that. Either that or exhaust him before he gets to you and that’s just about what could happen by the time the last leg of this Rafa watch comes around, either in Hamburg or, possibly, at Roland Garros.