Roger said once his overall confidence flows mostly from his service success--when he is serving well, the rest of his game seems to fall into place. Rafa has read Roger's serve better than anyone. Did Rafa ever lead the tour in breaking serves? Maybe, but he certainly seems to have prioritized figuring out Federer's. He's been jumping all over Roger's serve longer than anyone has. Then there's the robotic certitude with which Rafa's always hammering away at Federer's back hand. However successful that tactic was, it actually bored many tennis fans, myself included; but that's not so important. What is, however, is that Rafa and Toni appear to have keenly studied Roger's game with the sole aim of Rafa becoming Roger's kryptonite. More importantly, I believe this aim was, for a very long time, much higher on their list of priorities than developing Rafa's game such that he might start contesting non-clay slams better. I wonder whether Toni and Rafa thought things out any further than how best to expose Federer. But I wonder, if now the hour is not just a little too late for them to see through the amount of development that he would need to make in order to hang with Novak. Novak seems poised to grab the #1 ranking and hold onto it for so long that by the time he relinquished it, Rafa's window for playing at extremely high levels, based on his great physicality and the aura that he has been able to project--which, arguably, he earned mostly for being the guy who showed everyone that Roger could be mastered--will have closed on Rafa by the time Novak has finally sated his appetite for being #1. I believe that Rafa's role in tennis history was to expose Federer's game, and now that he has played his part, the stage belongs to Novak. Strange as this may sound, Rafa now seems less motivated and slower afoot that there is no Federer in the picture, no all consuming goal to gnaw on.
