Battle of Attrition: Melbourne edition

[Gerontophile]

That was a little annoying. I really like Caroline, but I so wanted Simona to win. I hope that Halep can come back.

[Southport Zeb]

I make it the third longest such run of this century:

French Open 2004 - Australian Open 2006 had eight women winning.
Australian Open 2011 - Wimbledon 2012 had seven different women winning.

[Jimski]

Great stats - thanks, SZ.

[Southport Zeb]

Only run longer than the eight from 2004-2006 was 9 different winners - Wimbledon 1936 to Wimbledon 1938

[Southport Zeb]

On the men's side, 9 is also the record - 1905 US Championship to 1908 Wimbledon (ignoring the French Champinships which was only open to French players at the time).

There have been 3 runs of 8:
1975 Wimbledon to 1977 French Open
2000 Wimbledon to 2002 French Open
2002 Australian Open to 2003 US Open

[Jimski]

Nice congratulatory message from Serena Williams to her close friend: https://twitter.com/serenawilliams/s...26785082548225

[Arturo]

Congrats to Wozniacki who I thought was going to throw it away at one stage. To echo the above, I hope Halep can come back from that one. It was punishing both mentally and physically in that heat.

[multipleman78]

There have been 3 runs of 8:
1975 Wimbledon to 1977 French Open
2000 Wimbledon to 2002 French Open
2002 Australian Open to 2003 US Open

Nice little snapshot of the transition period between the era of Sampras coming to a close and the era of Federer taking off. Remarkable to think that Federer's era is still on the go.

[Arturo]

Federer looking very good here. Cilic has lost his way since winning the second set.

[Satchmo Distel]

Roger wins and has now played 50 five-set matches in his Grand Slam career, with a win ratio of 30:20, according to Kevin Mitchell.

Ranking points: Federer and Nadal seem as far ahead now as they've ever been: points of the #2 are at least double the #3. This is partly because the injuries to Novak and Murray have created a vacuum that nobody has yet filled. If we say that the 'real' #3 should be inferred from the Slams, then Cilic might have the best claim, with two finals in the last three.

However, I'm not sure if Federer can close the gap on Nadal if Rafa regains his fitness, not to mention Novak and Murray. Does Roger want #1 badly enough to play the extra tournaments?

[Various Artist]

The stat that really got me, a little earlier, was that Roger Federer has now won 10% of all the men's singles Grand Slam tournaments ever played since the Open Era started 50 years ago – 20 out of 200. That somehow sounds even more ludicrous, beyond the mere fact that he's now pulled 3 more Slam triumphs out of the bag in 12 months, after the age of 35, and after apparently already being about six years past the stage where he looked like winning any more. It's gone beyond extraordinary. Just amazing.

[Antepli Ejderha]

Halep apparently spent four hours in hospital after the final, the roof was open for the women but closed for the men and she's suffered from this decision.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Ranking points: Federer and Nadal seem as far ahead now as they've ever been: points of the #2 are at least double the #3. This is partly because the injuries to Novak and Murray have created a vacuum that nobody has yet filled. If we say that the 'real' #3 should be inferred from the Slams, then Cilic might have the best claim, with two finals in the last three.

However, I'm not sure if Federer can close the gap on Nadal if Rafa regains his fitness, not to mention Novak and Murray. Does Roger want #1 badly enough to play the extra tournaments?

If Nadal is either out through injury etc. for any significant part of the next 4 months, or participating but falling significantly short of his very strong performance last year over that period, Federer could regain the #1 spot almost (NB almost) by default. The difference between the points the two men have to defend between now and the end of Roland Garros is extreme.

In Federer's case, only 2,045 of the 9,605 he will have in tomorrow's official rankings will drop off before the end of Roland Garros.

In Nadal's case, 5,670 of his 9,760 points fall off over that period.

In other words, the already-won (as of now) points Federer will still retain at the end of RG total 7,560. And for Nadal the number is only 4,090: that's 3,470 fewer.

Specifically, Federer has to defend only the following until end RG: 1,000 Indian Wells, 1,000 Miami, 45 Dubai

Over that period Nadal has to defend 90 IW, 600 Miami, 300 Acapulco, 500 Barcelona, 1000 Monte Carlo, 180 Rome, 1000 Madrid, 2000 Roland Garros.

Edit: of course, if Federer fails to win IW or Miami, that gives Nadal scope for missing out on some (NB some only) of his clay season successes of last year but still staying #1

[Seven Saxon Kings]

The longevity is obviously impressive but however many slams he picks up while Nadal and Djokovic (and to some degree Murray) are injured, he can never escape that he only won one slam in the seven year span from Aus 10 to Aus 17 because he was unable to cope with either of those two players at their peak.

[Satchmo Distel]

IMHO Nadal circa 2011 played the best tennis I have ever seen. Novak sometimes was up there but I think some of Roger's losses to him were in the head. Sure that's part of the game but I'm unsure that Federer did not have "the game" to cope had his mind been there. Roger also lost to Murray and Del Potro in this period, mainly due to not quite being mentally tough enough I think.

Meanwhile, to EEG's stat, Federer has played in 16.67% of all Open era GS finals.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Meanwhile, to EEG's stat,

To VA's stat, I assume you mean. My post was all about the chances of Federer becoming number 1 again this spring, perhaps only briefly, as Nadal's clay court season points from last year drop off.

[Satchmo Distel]

Yes.

[Various Artist]

Hah, it's ok Satchmo, I don't mind being confused with EEG...

The longevity is obviously impressive but however many slams he picks up while Nadal and Djokovic (and to some degree Murray) are injured, he can never escape that he only won one slam in the seven year span from Aus 10 to Aus 17 because he was unable to cope with either of those two players at their peak.

Oh, undeniably. After all, that's how it's supposed to happen: players peak, the few peak at the top of the mountain, the very greatest few have sustained runs of success over several years, but sooner or later even they get swallowed up by the rising tide of younger, hungrier players – who have grown to maturity some years after they did and in the meantime upped their game to the point where they can finally compete with and overtake them. That's the eternal cycle of these things.

The 'merely' remarkable thing about Federer was that past his theoretical peak he managed to stay so near the top of the tree for so many years after the superstars who rose in his wake grew to match or better him – taking the game to astounding levels in part because of the incredible standard he'd just set, and then of course because of the phenomenal level of competition between them over an extended period.

The astonishing thing about Federer, though, is that a decade down the track, when those brilliant players five or six years younger than him have hammered their bodies into chronic and perhaps career-shortening injury through reaching and maintaining that nigh-impossible standard, he's still there: taking apart the rest of the men's game as he has for 15 years. Plus of course this present run really started by getting a distinctly Nadal-shaped monkey off his back, in beating him in the Australian Open final a year ago. And whether or not Nadal and Djokovic (and Murray) are indeed past their peak, Federer is surely – as has been noted more than once in the past year – "not simply past his peak, but past the point where he was past his peak".
Yet the thing about the ambiguity of that phrase – its unintentional implication that maybe if someone is past being past their peak it means they're... at their peak... again... or something? – is how apt it seems to be turning out to be...!

[Various Artist]

IMHO Nadal circa 2011 played the best tennis I have ever seen. Novak sometimes was up there but I think some of Roger's losses to him were in the head. Sure that's part of the game but I'm unsure that Federer did not have "the game" to cope had his mind been there. Roger also lost to Murray and Del Potro in this period, mainly due to not quite being mentally tough enough I think.

Yes, it's so hard to quantify, isn't it? There's no one perfect measure to decide who's the greatest. We'll never know who might've achieved what, had we had the 'ideal' scenario for comparisons wherein Federer and the other two or three are all the same age and thus come through in perfect parallel; so we can't know whose peak was truly greater.

(The flipside of that speculation, to me, is that you could equally wonder what would the past 15 years have looked like if that trio hadn't played at all: if he'd 'only' had to deal with the likes of Hewitt, Roddick, Safin, Ferrer, Soderling, Del Potro, Wawrinka, Cilic, Berdych, Tsonga, Monfils, etc... You might ask if anyone at all would've stepped up to that highest plateau for more than a major or three, given that even now nobody seems capable of grasping the nettle. You wonder whether he'd have retired bored 6 or 7 years ago, or faded away from greatness sooner without that intense competition to spur him on, or whether he might have won 50 Slams by now.)

Yes, very arguably he didn't have the mental toughness to deal with the Nadal/Djokovic onslaught in particular; arguably because he'd not needed it against most of those just mentioned. For me it makes it all the more impressive that he's hung in there to have this recent renaissance. It's not just the longevity (as SSK notes) but the resilience that this entails – to find that mental toughness, to rise and rise again long after people were writing him off as a spent force, when no-one could have been surprised at a legend-in-his-own-lifetime with 15 or 16 or 17 Slams riding off into the sunset unable to cope with that extraordinary posse of younger gunslingers.
Sampras for instance is ten years older than Federer almost to the day, and he retired in 2002 – so the equivalent would've seen Federer quit after the 2012 Olympics or US Open, or maybe straight after his 17th Slam at Wimbledon that summer... and who would've begrudged him that? Or to turn the analogy around, his present achievements are the equivalent of Sampras winning the 2008 Australian Open, or Bjorn Borg winning it in 1993. Even Connors, who played at a very high level into his late 30s, won his last Slam aged 31 – as did Laver, for that matter, who despite his unmatched achievement in doing the Grand Slam in both the amateur and professional eras never actually won another won another major after his second clean sweep.

So, yeah. It's that willpower, the adaptability that has been necessary, and of course the way Federer plays the game – it's always been aesthetically a cut above almost anyone else who's played at such a high level, but more than that it seems that it's actively prolonged his career at these heights beyond all imagining. When you consider how in all this time he's rarely had significant injury absences at all (and even the one he did have in 2016 was a result of a freak accident running a bath for his kids), whereas Nadal, Djokovic and Murray's games are so much more indebted to unrelenting power-hitting, tigerish defending, endless running and retrieving they seem to have run and hit themselves into the ground, it looks like there's really something to be said for making tennis look like ballet.

Umm, sorry for rambling. Anyway, nobody's perfect, but for me that combination of all the above makes him the best I've ever seen. The simplest way I can put it is I've never been bored by Federer winning majors, like I was by Nadal's French Open wins, or by Pete Sampras in general in the 1990s. The first time I really noticed him was when I watched him beat Sampras so improbably but brilliantly at Wimbledon 2001, to snap his winning streak and nigh-invincible aura there, and frankly it's as much the case as anything to say that for me he's never lost the shine he got from doing that. I think it's an absurdly fortuitous treat that we're still getting to watch Roger Federer doing what he's doing now, all this time later, so long may it continue.