A few years ago I think there was this political saying, "it's the taxes stupid!", which won an election for someone, I can not help but use a similar sentence for the Federer-Nadal final in Roland Garros 2007, where Roger should have been saying to himself throughout the match; "It's the backhand slice stupid"!
Why? You may ask and so may Roger, the answer is very simple. During the whole match Roger hit seven backhand slices and from this variation won 6 points, this is 90% success! He also hit one forced slice error as last resort on the stretch, which I do not count.
What does this mean? Roger was being stubborn and wanting to beat Nadal at Nadal's own game with gruelling top-spin rallies. If Roger instead of hiting 100% of topspin backhands, had he mixed the slice only 60% of the times, statistically he would have won 50% more points! What would this mean for the match? Roger would have won the match in 3 straight sets! Mind boggling!
Nadal vs Federer the clash of Titans! - In spite of having two very worthy opponents in the semis, once again both Nadal and Federer proved to be the strongest.
Young Novak Djokovic, proved that he is a solid performer capable of tactical genious, backed by excellent stroke making but, the legs are not up to par with the physical requests, which Nadal fully exploited.
On the other hand Nikolai Davidenko with exceptional movement and stamina, showed us his mental fragility under winning pressure against a Roger Federer that knows it.
For parents and "wannabe" professional players it is hard to understand that this highly competitive sport of tennis seeks the boundaries of the maximum capacity of human efficiency. Neither do they realize that the decision for a career in top sports performance, especially in tennis, represents a persistent incision into a youngster's way of life.
Next, they lack the global vision to assess the future restrictions in the young person's development as well as in occupation education or job situations.
In many cases they do not either foresee the considerable financial expenses, demands on their own assets (parents) or that finding sponsor and tennis association funds is very difficult or extremely restricted. Therefore, at the training formation and talent selection, not only from the sporting point of view, but especially for ethical reasons, high requests on all areas should be placed on players by coaches and teachers.
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