Sinner - Medvedev - Dimitrov - Zverev

A bit of everything

Where does Sinner get all that power from?

There’s many reasons, but I’ve always loved how often the Italian finds the front (left) foot on his forehand. Interestingly, he does this even on very high forehands — something rarer — and absolutely smokes this one against Tomas Machac:

That is such good timing from up there. He had a fair bit to do to find the winner from that height. 103 mph! He really got hold of that one.

— TennisTV

Getting your left foot in front allows you to transfer your weight forward as you hit. See how Sinner lands in front of where he pushed off behind the baseline and still uncoiled his upper body. Forward weight transfer plus great uncoiling of his kinetic chain = 103 mph smokeshow. This was really urgent and clean footwork to quickly shuffle around this ball and get set for that kind of shot. Getting your hips side on, or ‘down the court’ also makes timing a little easier; you are less likely to ‘pull off’ the ball and let your weight fall sideways too much (something I touched on with Rune in the Brisbane Final)

Look out for that when Sinner plays Medvedev on Friday. Even in hard-hitting exchanges (when he isn’t pushed too wide) he will often find that left foot in front far more often than his opponents.

Medvedev’s backhand sword

Most players are considered forehand-hungry; they look for forehands (the ‘sword’) to inflict damage, and keep their backhand more consistent (the ‘shield’). Medvedev is inverted in this sense. His forehand is a great shield, especially when pushed wide to position A on the court (the wide forehand that is so susceptible in a lot of players), but it isn’t a great weapon considering the calibre of player he is; it’s a longer swing without a lot of racquet speed. Those two drawbacks don’t make for a time-stealing, power-generating forehand.

However, his backhand is a shorter swing, and he can flatten it out and direct it better than most. This is why he often runs around forehands from the middle to hit backhands.

From the Australian Open final:

If you can have your ball stay low, flat, and fading away from your opponent’s forehand, you’re in good shape against anyone.

Medvedev’s backhand also uses more forward momentum of his body, but notice how his back leg acts as a reactive break, hampering his efforts to turn that forward momentum into a smooth transition shot to the net.

Look for Medvedev to find that inside-out backhand against Sinner in their semifinal (their seventh meeting since 2023).

Dimitrov outclasses Alcaraz; Breathes Life into the One-Hander

Dimitrov played out of his skin to take down Alcaraz. Victory over Zverev in tonight’s semifinal would plant him — and the one-hander — back into the world’s top-10.

Rather than get technical I just want to celebrate this match as a win for the game. It was the perfect advertisement for what I call “middleweight tennis”:

The modern trend is clear at the top of the game: players are getting taller, one-handers are dying out, baseline play is the norm, and the fringe elements — slices, approach shots, volleys, and drop shots — are just that: fringe elements that certainly help, but aren’t necessary for year-round success (although the drop shot is having a moment, which is great). One only has to watch one Medvedev vs. Zverev match to have seen them all.…“middleweight tennis” — involving players who aren’t big enough to servebot and who use their footspeed and racquet work to win points — is the sweet spot in 2023.

Check out the Alcaraz/Dimitrov shotmaking:

Back in 1996 Bill Gates penned a short essay titled “Content is King”, the prescience of which made the title now a well-worn coinage. An excerpt:

“Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the Internet, just as it was in broadcasting… societies will see intense competition — and ample failure as well as success — in all categories of popular content — not just software and news, but also games, entertainment, sports programming, directories, classified advertising, and on-line communities devoted to major interests.”

Sports are a form of content designed to entertain.

If you go to Tennis TV’s YouTube homepage and sort by most popular you get these titles:

Kyrgios features heavily, unsurprisingly: on-court arguments, meltdowns, racquet smashes, and trickshots are all staples.

Love him or hate him, your brain chemistry loves him.

This is because popular content comes down to tickling our dopamine receptors in terms of novelty and surprise. Charles Duhigg, author of Supercommunicators, explained what makes a good story on a podcast episode of Hidden Forces (emphasis added):

“the key to remembering things is surprise, and that’s why the best stories contain an element of surprise. There’s an element of suspense and then an element of surprise, and that’s how you remember the story. Our brains are essentially story-remembering machines.”

Tennis matches are also stories, and just like the best stories, the best matches tend to have these elements of novelty, unpredictability, and the accompanying drama. Not only about the match itself, but the points as well.

Your brain loves this because it’s how we remember things, but just as important, it’s also how we learn things.

“Popularly, we believe that we learn from our mistakes. As it turns out, a more correct way to frame this belief is that we learn when outcomes deviate from expectations.”

— Errors, rewards, and reinforcement in motor skill learning¹

This match had no racquet smashes, no arguments, and nothing as bizarre as an Indian Wells bee invasion, but there was a lot of unpredictability embedded within the points, and that’s the feature of middleweight tennis that I think makes it so entertaining. The game’s best shotmakers — Carlos Alcaraz, Grigor Dimitrov, Roger Federer, Frances Tiafoe, Dan Evans, and Lorenzo Musetti — are, in other words, content makers.

GOAT-ing tennis does not require much variation, but perhaps the most entertaining tennis does?

All of this is to say that tennis is in the entertainment business, and while the health of the game leans heavily on governance — a topic having a moment — at the end of the day, the health of the game is really about good content, and good sports content is really about good aesthetics.

“It [sports] is an entirely artificial contest, insofar as its prelusory goals tend to be worthless or worth little. But what is important about them is that their pursuit creates the athletic beauty we seek: fully-exerted human bodies, graceful style, intricate tactics and real drama”

— Stephen Mumford, Ways of Watching Sport

Remember the best point of 2023?

It had the prerequisite quality — the athleticism and speed — but in terms of shot selection, it had everything from everywhere. Ordered, technical brilliance was intertwined with chaotic improvisation.

While no point in the Dimitrov vs. Alcaraz match reached that height, it was full of athleticism, variety, and shot-making. That shot-making included some ridiculous dimitrov backhand returns:

I touched on the death of the single-hander in a recent piece:

I think there is an aesthetic quality of the single-hander that is attractive, and therefore desirable. Sports are entertainment. Surface adjustments, balls, shot clocks, seeding structures, schedules, camera angles; all of these decisions were (and still are) made with the ‘product’ in mind. That we are losing an aesthetic shot, and one that brings variety to the visual experience, isn’t necessarily a good thing, but it has been exciting to see the next double-handed crop — Alcaraz, Rune, Sinner — willing to come forward, use the drop shot, attack returns, slice the backhand, and play with a degree of variation and athleticism that doesn’t have me worried; the kids are alright.

The game evolved; beauty has been handcuffed by function.

I don’t think that aesthetics and function are always in opposition to one another. Federer’s movement was the perfect example of their compatibility.²

“Research shows that symmetry is highly preferred across cultures, genders, and age groups. Additionally, this symmetry preference exists across many domains, whether it be in faces, foods, buildings, inanimate objects, or technological interfaces. Therefore, symmetry is one of the most prominent examples of an objectively defined characteristic of beauty. Other features such as balance, color, fractality, complexity, and curvature also point toward the existence of objective, universal standards.” (Aleem, et al., 2019). See footnote 2 for full reference.

Dimitrov may not have reached the grand slam heights many expected of him when he burst on the scene 15 years ago, but he’s produced his fair share of content that we’ve had the pleasure to enjoy.

Tennis Insights gave Dimitrov’s performance against Alcaraz a 9.44.

Zverev’s MOATs

In economics a ‘moat’ is a distinct advantage that a company has over its competitors. Alexander Zverev has two over his top-10 rivals: his first serve, and his two-handed backhand.

Neither of these are particularly sexy shots, but they are helpful at winning you tennis matches.

Imagine if Zverev had good forehand mechanics lol

And while Dimitrov has an eye-pleasing backhand, it’s done him no favours against Sascha. The Bulgarian owns a 1-7 record against Zverev, the lone win coming way back in 2014.

Styles make fights. Zverev is going to pound his serve and backhand, over and over again, into the Dimitrov backhand. I was just listening to Gill Gross’ Alcaraz versus Dimitrov match breakdown, and one criticism he had of Carlos was that he panicked; he didn’t try and lockdown the one area of the court that is difficult for Grigor to continuously dominate a match with: his backhand. I 100% agree.

No surprise that the Zverev backhand is technically one of the all-time greats. A high and full backswing from well inside the line of the ball, the left arm breaking the plane of his body, the right elbow high and clear in the follow-through. At 6’6’’ he is a monster with that thing.

From Love Tennis YouTube page.

The first semifinal between Sinner and Medvedev is just about to kick off.

I’m predicting a Sinner / Zverev final. See you in the comments. HC.

1. Lohse, K., Miller, M., Bacelar, M., & Krigolson, O. (2019). Errors, rewards, and reinforcement in motor skill learning. In Hodges, N. J., & Williams, A. M. (Eds.) (2020). Skill acquisition in sport: Research, theory, practice (3^rd ed.). Routledge.

2. Aleem, H., Pombo, M., Correa-Herran, I., & Grzywacz, N. M. (2019). Is beauty in the eye of the beholder or an objective truth? A neuroscientific answer. Mobile Brain-Body Imaging and the Neuroscience of Art, Innovation and Creativity, 101-110.