To me Federer played his best with his smaller Wilson rackets. (K-factor and so forth). There was a switch I think to a larger racket at one stage which immediately seemed like a mistake. His shots seemed loopier and less powerful with more unforced errors. He was spraying it.
Did anyone perceive this? What am I missing? Am I the only one to believe he played better with smaller frames than the larger ones? Yes, even on his backhand. Perhaps someone can clarify with his racket history and his thinking behind it. Did he not complain about the changes etc?
Like Zeb and others said, he changed to generate more (read: easier, spineless) power from his fundamentally weak backhand drive, at the cost of forehand accuracy, general accuracy, and further impounding his confidence. That's the principle of a switch to a bigger racket- loss of accuracy and a lazier generation of power- and then you compensate by going for fewer flat shots due to your lack of confidence in painting your lines. That naturally progresses to more fruity loops as you try to maintain some semblance of margin
and pace, which is very nearly a paradox at the top levels of tennis and one that early Agassi (who went for way too much at the dawn of his career) suffered from. That increased topspin you're hitting results in more stressful swinging motions that lead to greater injury risk- surprise. And you lose pace against opponents like Djokovic who know when and how to flatten their shots out, anyway. 2011 US Open return winners on match point come to mind. Wonder why Federer never hit any of those at 40-15.
Anyway, I don't hate the guy. But the criticism he gets for the safeguarded play's what's only coming to him from an objective standpoint. Hingis did the same thing in '98 after getting crushed on her serves. Switched to a bigger frame from the sleeker frame she was perfect with, and she started hitting UEs everywhere and compensating with topspin. The reliance on topspin over flat drives feeds into that positive feedback loop that your body simply isn't "geared anymore" towards playing a strong, attacking game, even though it's your mechanics that're changing because of your equipment-change. Though Hingis changed to get more service power, all the good players have interconnected games. The shots she hit were reliant on a well-placed serve to predict a return for her groundies.
Federer's backhands, were at least well-placed when DTL, and that coverage was the one still-a-weak point he sufficiently covered with natural talent to make him feel illusively invulnerable. But at what price when you don't work on your technique the
right way once it's under pressure, and you instead hastily change your tools to get a cheap fix, forgetting that your groundies are connected to your serve, and that your forehand is connected to your backhand, and that strong net approaches work best with smaller frames? Sometimes you don't even realize these connections until you're already midway through your subconscious change; and by then, it's too late to go back. You're in, what I call, the in-between zone.
