Is It The End of Stamina Tennis?

When some were talking about the future of tennis and not seeing great youngsters in the horizon, others again could see the potential and main trend in todays youngsters.

The potential doesn’t need to be discussed. We see it or we don’t but it was pretty clear that we had great young talents out there who would just take longer to mature due to the physicality of today's game. Those will make us look at this current "greatest era" with a bit more perspective when we will realise that this so called “greatest era" was actually deprived of great shot makers…at the very top of the game. 4 and 6 hours battles in slams finals of long rallies cannot be compatible with sharp and crisp shot making. We just saw today how a young talented player took his destiny in his hands and beat relatively convincingly an in-form Murray thanks to the very old 2-shot formula: great serve, great FH! This win today is very significant cause Raonic is still very young (21), clay woudl not typically be his best surface to win with a 2 shot strategy and 3 Murray actually played well, if not agressive by his standard, like he does versus Federer, knowing that anything less will be punished. Yet he lost pretty convincingly. Now it;s just a question of doing it in slams under even more pressure. JUst a question of time imo.

And the trend is that he is not alone. I do believe more like Dolgo, Harrison, Dimitrov will come of age soon and should challenge the very top players on regular basis with their explosive tennis refusing to get into endless rallies. Isner and Delpotro could be added to that list as the precursor of aggressive tennis again.

There have always been aggressive and defensive tennis players in all eras, including this one but what makes this era very special is that aggressive players have virtually no chance of getting to the business end of slams despite having probably the most talented and aggressive player of all times (Yes Federer, not Murray!). It's like having 3 Borgs in one era! The reasons have been discussed and are known: slow conds, diets, referring allowing too much time between points, string technology, etc…But the new generation once again is going to find a solution to break this down. We will always have defensive players always entertaining the longer rallies, Tomic being one for instance in that new generation who makes retrieving look very easy, but I don’t think they will be garanteed a place in slam finals systematically like they are now.

And that is good news. We want variety, don’t we?