A bit of both, but more Medvedev reaching out and taking it, I think. His serve was on for most of the match and he was never really in trouble on his service games for the first two sets, and he kept staying in the long rallies getting everything back and waiting for Djoker to make mistakes instead of going for winners, which proved to be a good strategy on this day.
Apparently Novax had a Seiko endorsement before Hublot and had some custom Novax models? Man of the people!
Thanks. Bolded seems like a loser on most days. Novax is usually a machine.
DM dominated on his own serve
Beat Novak at his own game on return games
Novak looked tired.
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Recorded the trophy stuff to watch the Browns choke.
Poor Rod still in the stands. Poor Novak having to see him there and not up on the platform.
Fuck Novak!
Does DM have enough to get to #1 yet?
No, and he actually lost ground this week.
I think I’ve asked this before and I forgot the answer. Why is Novax so much better at the Australian Open than the US Open? Are the surfaces really that different?
At the Australian Open he is nearly Rafa on Clay. At the US open he’s just a notch or two below that.
All I can relate to his one of the parks here has a slightly grittier service. Flats balls bounce less. Top spin balls bounce more. It’s not noticeable underfoot. But all of us that play there notice it’s “different”.
The surfaces are different but in what ways and by how much is extremely difficult to answer. The court surfaces change a lot. In fact, I’m pretty sure they resurface the courts at all of the venues annually and play around with the top coat formulations but here is a quick history:
The AO switched from grass to Rebound Ace (the green court) in 1988 and kept it until 2007. A lot of players complained about it, claiming that it got sticky in the heat and caused injuries (a later analysis found no evidence for this claim). They switched to Plexicusion (the blue court) from 2008 to 2019 and now use a surface called Greenset. The US Open used DecoTurf from 1978 to 2019 but recently switched to Laykold. These are all just different brands of basically the same thing which is a layered court with a rubberized cushion beneath an acrylic top coat, but different formulations of the components can lead to different speed, skid, and bounce.
It doesn’t seem like good scientific measurements exist for these factors and what you’ll usually see is how players describe the courts in a particular year. I know they were saying the AO played extremely fast this year. Also, they have been intentionally slowing all of the courts down for years to make tennis “more exciting” for casual fans which is one of the reasons why a few players win all of the slams:
This is why I think all of the gushing over the current dudes with 20 slams being the GOATs is kind of LOL. This game they’re playing is just completely different from tennis that was played before ~2000. Agassi winning a career grand slam was a huge deal at the time. Would anyone even get excited about that now?
Thanks. That was an interesting read, but it actually makes Djoker’s disparity between Aussie Open and US Open results even more inexplicable.
Slowr hard courts
Rafa fed and Novak would curb stomp Agassi
And that’s coming from Darren Cahill and BG who coached Andre
Andre is just a poor mans version of Novak
If AA played from 2005-2020 he would have -0- slams
Similar to roddicks Career
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Yes. Modern day sportsmen and women are always superior to their predecessors.
There’s just more gluten in the air in NYC.
It’s all those pizza ovens.
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It’s not just that
Andre won majors because he was an amazing returner
Djovokic is a better return and has a better game
Sampras would still have won majors. His serve forehand combo can just shut people down
Lol ok guy
Agassi is just an example of my point. The best players study and take from their predecessors and improve on them: Nadal and Djok were better returners and the rest of their games were much better.
Sampras was a mediocre returner whose block returns were just a way of getting the point underway, and relied on his incredible serve and powerful ground strokes. He was finished by 30, beaten by 19 year old Federer at Wimbledon. I’m not sure he’d have got past the big three at their peaks.