If Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic Were all the same age.

Originally Posted by Towser83

Yeah on clay Nadal has a massive edge, although the way he played this year at RG, if he keeps playing like that in future years, Federer might have got the chance to play him a few times later on and get some wins. In fact I think Federer would have avoided Nadal on clay more times in Nadal's best years since Federer didn't become that consistant on clay til he was 24/25. so If Nadal is declining on clay at 25 then Federer probabaly would have played him at a much better time for him and not have such a bad clay H2H.

At worst I give Federer a fairly even H2H on hard, but it's a big guess especially as they've never even played at the US Open. At the same age he might have lost the first slam meeting on hardcourt to Nadal, but it's hard to say because sometimes Nadal is unbeatable and othertimes he's there for the taking.What would have been interesting is Federer coming up and playing Nadal in a quarter final or 4th round.Probabaly would have been Nadal's but earlier on Nadal did have his off days.

So Nadal might still have a leading H2H but not massive thanks to Federer not making that many clay finals in Nadal's prime, but making HC finals at the same time Nadal does.

That sounds reasonable enough. As for Nadal 25+ on clay it is too soon to tell at this point.

[FedExpress 333]

The poll says it all.

[Cup8489]

Originally Posted by NadalAgassi

Now according to ****s Nadal "struggled" with Federer on clay, ROTFL, ****ism knows no bounds. What about Federer whose peak was from 04-06 where he lost 2 out of 3 outdoor hard court matches to a 17-19 year old and was 2 points from a 3 straight set loss in the only win; where he was owned by Nadal everytime out on clay; and when he was one bad serve game from Nadal from going down 2 sets to 1 vs a green Nadal who was just starting to learn to play on grass in the Wimbledon final.

You call rome 2006 ownage?

Can I have some of your crazy, I have too much sanity for my own good compared to you.

[Cup8489]

Originally Posted by veroniquem

Federer has the WORST possible record in 5th sets. To give you an idea, this is a few win % for 5th set in open era:

1-Nadal: 83.3
4-Borg: 80.0
8-Murray: 75.0
11-Djokovic: 72.2
17-Becker: 69.6
19-Sampras: 68.8
117-Federer: 52.9


The notion that 5 setters would have helped Fed in any way, shape or form get an edge over Nadal at any point in his career is HIGHLY laughable

Good thing Federer won the vast majority of his best of 5-set matches in straight sets, then

[veroniquem]

I'm not arguing that. Once again, it's the specific Fed-Nadal match up we're discussing and in that specific match up it is highly unlikely Fed would have ever won most matches in straights.

[veroniquem]

Originally Posted by Towser83

between 18 and 22, Federer would have probabaly not made enough finals to even lose to Nadal.

But Fed wouldn't have made the #2 ranking in those years, so he would have had plenty of opportunities to lose to Rafa in earlier rounds.

[Towser83]

Originally Posted by NadalAgassi

That sounds reasonable enough. As for Nadal 25+ on clay it is too soon to tell at this point.

yeah the next couple of years will be interesting.

Originally Posted by veroniquem

But Fed wouldn't have made the #2 ranking in those years, so he would have had plenty of opportunities to lose to Rafa in earlier rounds.

That's true, it could have happened like that. I still think less though, especially as he'd have Djokovic to contend with as well who was good on clay from 19/20 years old.

when Federer was 19 (2001 lets say) he had a pretty good clay season, a run to the quarters of RG and monte carlo, maybe he plays Nadal a couple of times. The next year he wins Hamburg which Nadal never played early on but lost first round of RG and Rome and won 1 match in MC, so unlikely to play Nadal. Next year gets to the final of Rome so must play Nadal, but is now in the top 5 so has to get to at least quarters to meet him elsewhere and the next year again Hamburg is the only place Federer does well.

Obviously this isn't exact because it depends on whether we make Nadal and Djokovic older, putting making them 30 NOW, or make Federer younger and playing in today's field. But I don't think Federer would meet Nadal as many times as he has on clay. At 19 he could have met him a few times, but at 20 he was hopeless apart from Hamburg (so depends if Nadal played it or not) and at 21 Federer would be having to make the quarters

Federer from age 18-21 would regularly lose to Nadal on all surfaces, not just clay. I forgot to even factor in how weak (relatively) Federer was those years into a hypothetical head to head actually. Nadal being the same age would build such a big lead during Federers pre prime years that his overall head to head might be even more decisive than the current one. To put it into perspective Federer ended 2002 aged 21 ranked #6 in the World. He ended 2001 aged 20 ranked #13 in the World. He did not even get past the round of 16 of a hard court slam until aged 22, did not win a Masters title on hard courts until age 22, and did not get past the round of 16 of the U.S Open until age 23, so Nadal at those ages was having clearly superior results even on hard courts, despite his own sucky (relatively) hard court slam results for awhile. Then when you factor in the unfavorable matchup aspect, well 18-21 year old Federer would not want to play 18-21 year old Nadal anywhere.

[Biscuitmcgriddleson]

Originally Posted by NadalAgassi

Federer from age 18-21 would regularly lose to Nadal on all surfaces, not just clay. I forgot to even factor in how weak (relatively) Federer was those years into a hypothetical head to head actually. Nadal being the same age would build such a big lead during Federers pre prime years that his overall head to head might be even more decisive than the current one. To put it into perspective Federer ended 2002 aged 21 ranked #6 in the World. He ended 2001 aged 20 ranked #13 in the World. He did not even get past the round of 16 of a hard court slam until aged 22, did not win a Masters title on hard courts until age 22, and did not get past the round of 16 of the U.S Open until age 23, so Nadal at those ages was having clearly superior results even on hard courts, despite his own sucky (relatively) hard court slam results for awhile. Then when you factor in the unfavorable matchup aspect, well 18-21 year old Federer would not want to play 18-21 year old Nadal anywhere.

That assumes Federer would even meet Nadal. Doubt he would given his results. But hey let's keep brushing over the fact Nadal's style is dependent upon fitness and athletic ability and Federer's is an attacking game which takes more time to develop.

[Mike Sams]

I don't get it. Why are there only 14 votes for Nadal compared to 130 for Federer? This board is absolutely littered with Nadal fans! Something wrong with the poll?

[Agassifan]

LOL @ this thread. The poll speaks for itself

[DragonBlaze]

Originally Posted by Mike Sams

I don't get it. Why are there only 14 votes for Nadal compared to 130 for Federer? This board is absolutely littered with Nadal fans! Something wrong with the poll?

I'm guessing you are being sarcastic? Hard to tell over the internet.

Still along with Federer fans, most neutral fans would have voted for Federer along with some fans of Djoker and Nadal. Because that is most likely what would have happened IMO.

[beast of mallorca]

Originally Posted by DragonBlaze

I'm guessing you are being sarcastic? Hard to tell over the internet.

Still along with Federer fans, most neutral fans would have voted for Federer along with some fans of Djoker and Nadal. Because that is most likely what would have happened IMO.

Neutral fans ? Really ? On this board ?

[DragonBlaze]

Originally Posted by beast of mallorca

Neutral fans ? Really ? On this board ?

Well there are a fair few posters who don't like any of the top 4 today, I consider them to be neutral. Ofcourse they don't post often in these part of the forums since it's ridiculously difficult to have a rational discussion without the excessive use of hyperbole, e.g. so and so demolished player Y, never mind that it was a 5 set match or anything etc etc.

Still, you are right as well.

[zagor]

Originally Posted by Benhur

There is no need to go back 50 years, and I don’t believe that slower conditions (humoring for a moment the notion that they are a lot slower now) should be a hindrance to longevity. If anything, I might believe the exact opposite. Long term stamina does not go down appreciably at 30, and in many cases it may even increase with respect to early 20s, which is why endurance sports like marathon running and cycling often feature 30+ year old athletes doing very well. It is reaction time and reflexes that go down first, and these are much more necessary in faster conditions than in slower ones. Vilas continued playing with some success until his mid 30s, almost exclusively on clay, the slower the better. And in the early 90s you may still remember Lendl at the age of 32 beating none other than Bruguera on clay, but also occasionally beating guys like Becker, Edberg or Sampras at 30 and 31 on faster surfaces. Or Connors still playing on tour into his 40s. Or Sampras winning the USO a few months before his 31st birthday. That wasn’t 50 years ago. These are just examples I can think of right away, I am sure if you dig into tennis records you will find plenty of other examples to conclude that a 30 year old tennis player is often perfectly capable of beating younger players ranked above him.

You can find isolated examples of 30+ year old playing great but overall you'd have to go as far as 1969 to find a (relatively early blooming) tennis great who was playing at a level comparable to his youth for a substantial period of time, not a few tourneys/matches in a year.

Also I don't give a crap whatsoever how cyclicst, marathon runners etc. do in their 30s (and beyond), why should I base my expectations of how a given tennis player would do at the age of 29-30 on how cyclist and marathons do at such an age when I have plenty of examples from you know tennis to draw conclusions from and make comparisons to.

Originally Posted by Benhur

In what sense the game is slower today is also unclear to me, considering that players are dealing with balls that come at them a lot faster than they did in, say, 1970. Would the 30 year olds today do better if the courts and the balls further enhanced the effect of the much harder hitting we see today?

The conditions today are slower and tougher on the body than they were in 1970, again:

-Most tournaments today are on played HC which has been slowed down considerably, can you think of any surface more damaging/grueling to players than a slooow HC? A medium-fast HC is a different matter entirely as the points are usually short but

-Carpet is out as a surface

-Grass has been slowed down

-They use heavier balls


So basically you have CC style long drawn out rallies (no first strike tennis, no serve and volley, no short rallies etc.) on freakin HC for most of the year, if that isn't a recipe for disaster to player's bodies then I don't know what is.

Originally Posted by Benhur

Could 2011 Federer beat 2006 Federer? Not very often, but sometimes. Maybe 20-25 percent of the time. It should be clear I am not speaking of any frozen version at a particular level of play, but of any random version of a player taken on a random day in 2011 and 2006, which is how real tennis matches are played. They are not played between idealized versions of players.

I'd wager 2011 would beat 2006 Federer 10-15% of the time since he would be playing a better version of himself which can be one of the most lopsided match-ups in tennis (like say Becker-Sampras when Pete came into his own).

Again, I agree that Fed can still play great tennis occasionaly but these days he struggles to keep up his level not just from tourney to tourney but heck in the same match from set to set.

Originally Posted by Benhur

And that is why no sweeping conclusions can be drawn from the fact that this player at this age, on a given day, had match points or beat another player at another age, if only because this player at this age could also beat himself at another age, on a given day, as we all know.

I didn't draw a sweeping conclusion, as I said too many variables come into play in any given match, especially matches between top players.

I claimed however that if a 30 year old Fed beat Novak in a slam match and had MPs in another one then saying that a 24-25 year old Fed wouldn't stand a chance against a 24-25 year old Novak is beyond stupid, I still strongly maintain that.

Originally Posted by Benhur

The other notion, the one that assumes tennis spent about 100 years in paleolithic prehistory and then underwent a sudden technological transformation, coupled with a kind of mutation of human physical capabilities that changed its essence and makes it impossible for 30 year olds to remain competitive, is also something I have a hard time understanding, but that is a different topic, on a par with many other bizarre but widespread beliefs, like the belief that human beings today are vastly more intelligent than, say, 300 years ago.

That never was my argument, I said conditions have changed not what it takes to succeed in pro tennis. If Laver, Rosewall, Gonzales, Mcenroe, Borg etc. grew up today(in modern tennis) I could see all of them being mutliple slam winners, reaching #1 etc. With their talent/skill/dedication/mental strength they would have been great in any era they grew up in.

However do I think they could play at such a high level in 30 and beyond as they did (Laver winning a Calendar Grand slam and Pancho being competitive into almost his 40s? IMO no, modern tennis is just too grueling to allow that kind of longevity.

[Benhur]

Originally Posted by NamRanger

So basically you're just agreeing with what Zagor said. Yes, Federer at 30 is capable of beating good players. He's got alot of experience, a truck load of weapons still, and a little chip on his shoulder. The biggest difference between Federer at 30 and 25 is not really his level of play, but how long he can sustain that level of play. I think that's what alot of people are missing.

I think it’s mostly the frequency with which he can do it. The fact that he can do it is not in question.

It’s no coincidence that pretty much any past decade you wish to examine, many of the number one players in it were able to win slams at 30 or older. As recently as the 90s, most of the main number ones in that decade (Lendl, Sampras, Agassi) were able to accomplish exactly that. In the case of Lendl, he was still ranked number one at 30 (in 1990), and still playing like this at 32 against top players in their prime:

Lendl-Becker USO 1992
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9zLAqQUmkU

The phenomenon is too common to be considered exceptional.

The fallacy consists in saying: "If player A, at 30+, can do this and that to player B in his prime, imagine what he would have done at 26. He would have crushed him!"

In many cases the theory cannot be checked and goes happily unchallenged. But when it can be checked, it very often fails. We have matches from Lendl's primiest prime against babyish Becker that disprove it. The conclusion is that the ‘grandpa’ player, in many of these cases, must have been playing as well (or better) than he did in his prime, and therefore he was no grandpa at all.

[zagor]

Originally Posted by NadalAgassi

So basically Federer and Nadal on non clay surfaces would be quite competitive with both in their primes, while Nadal would have the considerable edge on clay. That is basically what some of us are saying, and that would suggest Nadal > Federer in just the head to head matchup alone. Of course there is more to who wins then the head to head matchup. Nadal can lose to alot more players on all hard courts especialy than Federer, and would do so even in his prime.

I definitely also agree with this, however there's one issue I'd like to adress that I think no one did here. Most of Nadal's wins over Fed on HC came in Miami and it's such a specific surface that I'd even go as far as to say that it might even be worse for Fed to play Nadal than clay.

I know you might consider it to be a stretch but let's look at their matches there, two of Nadal wins in Miami over Fed were beatdowns and third one was supposed to be one before a miraculous come back from the dead for Roger. Let's imagine for a moment that 2005 Miami final wasn't a best of five(like it isn't today), that would be 3 straight set beatdowns Nadal gave Fed there out of 3 matches played.

I mean even this year look at how Fed faired against Nadal in Miami compared to Madrid(I know not the best example considering you could make a similar argument for it) and RG(better example).

Of course that has no relation to Dubai match (reasonably fast HC) which was a big win for Nadal considering all the circumstances.

[Benhur]

Originally Posted by zagor

You can find isolated examples of 30+ year old playing great but overall you'd have to go as far as 1969 to find a (relatively early blooming) tennis great who was playing at a level comparable to his youth for a substantial period of time, not a few tourneys/matches in a year.

Also I don't give a crap whatsoever how cyclicst, marathon runners etc. do in their 30s (and beyond), why should I base my expectations of how a given tennis player would do at the age of 29-30 on how cyclist and marathons do at such an age when I have plenty of examples from you know tennis to draw conclusions from and make comparisons to.
.

I don’t know what you mean by isolated examples, when it is clear we are talking about the very top players in each period, the great ones, because they are the only ones whose game was great enough that when they are able to recall it at a later age, they can still beat anyone with it. If a 30 year old player who never made it to the top 10 happens to play some matches as well as he did in his prime, that's unlikely to draw much notice.

You pick 1969 as the last time these things happened. Well, the big dominant names in tennis since 1969 up until the arrival of Federer -- the great ones -- could be listed as: Laver, Connors, Borg, McEnroe, Lendl, Sampras, Agassi, Federer.

Borg and Mac burned out for various reasons around the age of 25. Fine. How about the others?

If you are going to argue that today’s appallingly slow conditions create an endurance problem for 30 year old players, you must not dismiss as “crap” indications that stamina/endurance is not a problem at that age, even if they come from outside of tennis.

Sometimes player’s comments also help. Lendl retired at 34 with back problems. In an interview a few years ago, he explained the aging process in tennis, and what he says makes a lot of sense:

In tennis, as you get older, it’s not that you lose the straight-line speed or the stamina - the stamina actually gets better - it’s the agility of turning [you lose] and agility was starting to go. A split-of-a-second late here, two splits there and the point is gone. And you can’t do anything about it. There is nowhere to hide.

Now, basic common sense suggests that agility becomes more important on faster surfaces. And stamina becomes more important on slower surfaces. But maybe for you it is the opposite.

So the Big Modern Slow Down, if true, should favor stamina over agility. Therefore, the Big Modern Slow Down should not be invoked as a recent physical impediment to players in their late 20s early 30s.

I repeat, there is no significant decrease in stamina at 30, and there is evidence it may be higher than in the early 20s.

[purge]

all in all probably irrelevant

we wouldnt know anyway

[Benhur]

Originally Posted by zagor

I claimed however that if a 30 year old Fed beat Novak in a slam match and had MPs in another one then saying that a 24-25 year old Fed wouldn't stand a chance against a 24-25 year old Novak is beyond stupid, I still strongly maintain that.

Definitely, if someone did say that, it is indeed far beyond stupid; in fact I would consider it obvious trolling not even worth responding to. (For the record, I think 24 year old Federer would win at least 60% of his matches against 24 year old Djokovic.)

But what prompted me to respond to you earlier was the pretty sweeping claim you yourself made that 2005 Federer would "clean the court", or some such words, with his current version, which is in fact the same as saying that current Federer wouldn't stand a chance against his old self. That statement I strongly disagree with. In my mind, current Federer still stands a clear, realistic chance against any player who ever played the game, including any older version of himself. He is still a threat in every major, not only because he is Federer but also because he is only 30, and I don't mean the only sarcastically at all. I mean it seriously. He is not a grandpa in any sense as you call him. Maybe by the time he is 35 or 40 I would agree with your statement. But not quite yet.