So it’s no secret that the 2009 Wimbledon final between Federer and Roddick (yes, another Roddick thread) has gained somewhat of a controversial reputation around here, at least in the past year or so. Some hail it as one of the greatest matches of all time, others label it a glorified servefest. Whichever opinion one holds seems to be contingent on which fanbase they belong to.
@The Guru and I felt that it was about time for a rewatch of the entire match and so we did exactly that and compiled a bunch of notes on the final. Our opinions of the match differ in some respects as he’s a Djokovic fan and I’m a Federer fan but I like to think this was a pretty honest and genuine way of approaching the match and I hope our analyses will lead to some interesting discussion on its merits and faults.
We wrote a lot, though, so I understand it’s a tricky read. If you want to watch the final for yourselves, it’s available in full on the Wimbledon YouTube channel. Without further ado…
Third Serve’s Analysis:
Overall Summary:
This match hangs on two distinct aspects: the
serve-return complex and the
big points. Everything else comes secondary, and not by a short distance either. That's not to say that things like forehands, backhands, movement, and volleys are unimportant here but much greater emphasis than usual is placed on those first two areas of the game. A part of it is because of the surface (which, to my eyes, seems a little quicker than 2007 or 2008) but part of it comes down to the players themselves.
Let's get the obvious out of the way first. Both players serve very well. This is one of Federer's finer serving performances at Wimbledon. He bangs down aces and unreturnables at a high frequency, his serve percentage is pretty good (64% for the match), his placement is solid, his second serving is even weapon-level strong most of the time, and he still keeps the double faults low. But while Federer serves
great, Roddick serves
amazingly. He serves at 70% which is a stunningly high number by anyone's standards. One might think Andy took a little bit off the serve to get his numbers up that high; he most certainly doesn't. Roddick's first serves regularly hit the 130mph mark and a not insignificant number of them cross 140... even his second serves clock in at the 110s. Good placement on them too.
In fact, let's talk about the placement for a second because it partly explains a curious statistic: Fed's ahead in the ace tally by a massive margin, 51 to 27. I mean, he does serve
well, but on that shot alone, Roddick clearly does better. So why are the ace counts the way they are? Part of it has to do with the placement of the serves from both players. Fed goes out wide or down the T roughly an equal number of times, and he does so well that it's often tricky to get a racket on them. On the other side, Roddick employs a relatively high proportion of body serves--he hits about as many of those as he does wide serves, just looking at the numbers. About midway through the second set, my feed pulled up a graphic showing that Roddick did change his serving patterns from the 2004 final. There, he went wide most of the time, but here there are far more body or T serves. Fed does get his racket on these body serves (of course) but they either go unreturned or they extract weak responses for Roddick to punish. This explains the ace differential a little bit.
The other thing that explains it is that Roddick does not return well at all. Granted, he's up against a tough serve and anyone would struggle with that, but let's just say that Roddick was dealt a bad hand here and played it meekly. Fed's serve is a little closer to the mortal realm than Roddick's and a decent portion of his serves are at the very least returnable. Still, even when it's those serves that come into play, Roddick hits a high number of return errors, many of them very clearly unforced. There's also a good bit of what I'm inclined to think is tanking on the return. Once down 30-0 or 40-0, Roddick occasionally just stops trying to go for it and lets aces slip by. He's not a natural returner in the first place but I will say it's a little disheartening to see how that part of his game has fallen from the balls-to-the-wall second serve returning he put up in the 2004 final. This won't be the last comparison to that match. One more thing is that Roddick doesn't move very much on the return. Fed at least glides around the court somewhat to line himself into position and give himself a puncher's chance at returning the serve, but Roddick's feet are essentially cinder blocks a good majority of the time.
Fed doesn't return super well either. Unlike Roddick's which is decidedly below par, however, Fed's return is just pretty average. He's up against legitimately GOAT-tier serving which has to factor into the analysis and given that,
in a vacuum he doesn't return badly: there's just some room for work. It's a little bit better than I remembered but not by much. I am pretty confident now that the returning he displayed in this final was at least a half-step up from that in the previous year's final, though. It's mostly due to the significantly fewer F-ups on the second serve.
Now I say "in a vacuum" because
by Fed's personal standards this is a bad returning-the-Roddick-serve day. Throughout his career, Fed possessed a truly uncanny ability to read Roddick's serve in a manner that I don't think anyone except maybe a peak Djokovic (and we never really saw Roddick vs. Djokovic peak to peak so even this is unproven) could equal. It didn't really matter whenever Roddick had a good serving day (2004 final) or a not-so-good one (2003 semifinal). Fed would consistently return his serve back with interest and neutralize much of the advantage Roddick was supposed to have obtained. Here, though, it seems like he's forgotten his magic. Of course, Roddick is serving at pretty much his absolute best here, a step over their previous encounters at Wimbledon, but the difference is not so significant as to excuse Fed not breaking Andy's serve all the way up until the penultimate game of the match. One does wonder if Roddick's change in serving pattern had to do with some of it, though, given the graph from earlier.
Speaking of breaks, what's up with Roddick breaking the Federer serve twice in two separate sets? He was supposed to have the worse return, correct? Well, that is undeniably true, but what's also true is that
Roddick plays a clutch match on the whole. With one infamous exception, he takes his opportunities wherever he finds them, so if Fed slips up just a little bit during his service games, Roddick almost invariably pounces. On the reverse side, whenever Roddick has the rare prolonged service game, he weathers the storm with perfect, clutch serving and denies Fed a break (there's a small bit of Fed making errors in those moments but the outcome is mostly on Roddick). Even the one break he does surrender at the end comes down not to mentality but to stamina. Were it not for Roddick absolutely bombing serves down throughout the whole ordeal and playing the big points well, this match would likely have been a straightforward (something like the 2006 US Open final I imagine) win for Fed... because aside from those two things, Fed leads Roddick in pretty much every aspect of the game, and not by small margins either.
