And Thiem all of a sudden couldn't buy a serve in the final and was a complete error machine.
You can't knock Nadal. It's not his fault. He must be laughing his arse off at these youngsters who at age 24(not even that young any longer) can't step up when it matters. I mean, Nadal won his first slam at age 19, Djokovic was 20. What is wrong with these youngsters? It's not normal.
They just don't have it talent wise. I'm not talking about mentally. I'm talking actual honest to god ability to consistently hit a tennis ball without making errors.
Look at all of them. None of them have a killer shot. They're baseliners without Big 3 level talent.
Raonic was always going to be a big lumbering oaf. Nishikori is fragile and even when he's healthy his serve is a major weakness. Dimitrov probably has the most natural ball striking ability, but he serves too many DFs. Zverev has a technical flaw in his FH, not to mention that no one that tall has ever had an ATG career. Thiem is a ball basher with zero tennis IQ. He just works way too hard producing his strokes. Kyrgios doesn't give AF, and tbh even if he did I'm still far from convinced with that shovel of a BH he has. He even powder puffs the FH on occasion and he'll never morph into Mr. Stamina overnight.
Even Shapovalov has to reign it in consistency wise if he wants to succeed in this era of tennis. Otherwise he'll be the next Thiem. The scary part is that I can keep going. Chung's serve is atrocious and Rublev is a FH and not much else.
We have an era of winners right now that have
zero weaknesses. And a bunch of young guys coming up that have at least one glaring weakness. Not necessarily mentally even though that transfers over in pressure situations. It's a genuine stroke producing weakness (that will show itself mentally in pressure situations), whether it be Zverev's FH, Chung's serve, Dimitrov's serve etc.....
And Federer, Nadal, and even Djokovic before he went crazy and Murray before he had surgery all know those weaknesses and exploit them ruthlessly. If you're not good at the net they expose that. If you can't move north-south very well, they expose that. If you can't last in a 30+ shot rally for more than an hour or two, they expose that. If you can't hit a BH or FH consistently, they expose it etc... And they can because they have no weaknesses, or the ones they do have are only exploited when they play each other.