I think Roger was fit enough. What was affected to a great extent was his mind, his confidence. By that virtue, his body was affected as well - you can see it in his face, the way he gets down on himself. Eventually he stops moving his feet and you can see a certain fatigue there.
Nah, the thing with Roger is that he used to be really bad about using his legs consistently. And you can still pick it up, when he's fatigued, he like most players starts to stand up real straight and arm shots. His BH pretty much died after his legs tired out there. No depth, no pace. Granted, Nadal does this to the majority of players out there.
I'm sure I'll get flack for questioning Roger's movement or his conditioning. But he didn't play a lot of match-play tennis leading up to the French Open. In my mind, even after winning in Hamburg, he was in no position to seriously challenge a well rested Nadal at the FO this year.
In terms of mental makeup, I just feel Roger's been stubborn with his play this year. Like with Canas, he wanted to shoot him off the court. Against Nadal on grass, he played too much of the match from far back, whereas Nadal was forcing Federer into a north-south game.
And I don't blame him - he has no reason whatsoever to believe in himself when Nadal is hitting precise groundstrokes with immense topspin to his backhand and then pesters him continuously when Roger is serving (badly).
Yeah, one thing that people missed was how much out of his comfort space Federer was, in trying to force inside-out shots again and again. It worked for him at Hamburg, but here he was often trying to slide his way into inside-out FHs, which led to a high UE count.
I agree with Drak's assessment of Federer's current game against Nadal. He's reasonably improved his BH vs. FH matchup against Nadal. It's really the FH vs. FH match up which causes Federer to not sustain any momentum or generate breaks.
