Can Federer Be Number 1 Again
Tin can Roger Federer Exist Roger Federer Again?
He has twenty Grand Slam titles, but he is 39 and has non played competitively in more than than a yr. That changes this calendar week in Qatar.
It is 1 of the groovy unknowns in tennis, but Roger Federer is finally dorsum to help change that.
This week — later on more than a year away from the game — Federer will play his first competitive match since injuring his correct genu and undergoing ii operations in 2020.
Only volition he always again be the Roger Federer who divers his sport for so many years and won twenty Grand Slam singles titles, eight of them at Wimbledon? Will he all the same be the ethereal shotmaker, the merciless assassin disguised every bit the ultimate tennis gentleman, the master of playing tennis without seeming to suspension a sweat?
Considering of his history, no one has dared to reply those questions in the negative, non since he made information technology articulate he would play competitively again in 2021.
Federer, 39, will take the court this week in Doha at the Qatar Open and begin a phase of his career that he has never truly experienced: where every surprising loss — and in that location volition be surprising losses — will generate questions about whether he should just call it a career.
Federer asked for patience at a news conference on Sunday. He is still building, trying to become stronger, better, fitter, faster, with the goal of being at 100 percent by Wimbledon, which is set to begin on June 28.
"Everything until and so, information technology's like let'south see how it goes," he told dozens of journalists during one of those virtual news conferences that the world has go used to in the past year while he has been nursing his injuries. "Everything starts with the grass."
The tennis earth may non share his patience. His every move will be picked apart for hints of whether he can make this comeback something other than a valedictory. In a sense, Federer is a victim of his success. In 2016, a torn meniscus in his left knee and a tweaked back sidelined him for six months. When he returned, at 35, in 2017, at that place was chatter he had passed his sell-by date.
But the Federer who showed up afterwards that layoff had new ability and assailment, especially on his backhand, long a weakness that his rival Rafael Nadal took advantage of with his left-handed crosscourt forehands. Federer pushed closer to the baseline during points, pressuring opponents and attacking the net when he saw opportunities to end points quickly.
He won the 2017 Australian Open in the first calendar month of his comeback, finishing information technology by coming back from 3-1 down to Nadal in the fifth set to win, 6-3, in a remarkable brandish of grit and shotmaking under pressure level. Then, in July 2017, he captured his eighth Wimbledon title without losing a set.
"I've always been a guy who can play very trivial and play very well," Federer said.
After that improvement, the Federer legend grew fifty-fifty larger, especially amidst his staunchest competitors.
"Roger makes you feel like you're really bad at lawn tennis," Nick Kyrgios, an Australian, said of Federer last calendar month at the Australian Open. "He walks around, he flicks his caput, and I'm like, I don't fifty-fifty know what I'one thousand doing out here."
Merely will he be able to do that once again?
Paul Annacone, who coached Federer to a Wimbledon title a decade agone as the histrion struggled to keep upwardly with Nadal and a rising Novak Djokovic, said he had no doubt that Federer would again accept groovy moments, even stretches of luminescence. The question is, will he be able to sustain them? Will he be able to maintain a high level of play through v matches of a regular tour event or 7 matches at a Grand Slam tournament?
Prototype
All pro lawn tennis players can achieve a sublime level for stretches, but over the course of a match or a tournament, players are generally only as skillful as their boilerplate level of play. So how good volition Federer's average be?
"Historically, it'south been the older yous are, the more challenging it is to get back what y'all take given upwardly, in terms of fourth dimension," Annacone said in an interview concluding week. "But with the smashing players, yous make predictions at your peril."
Annacone has a unique window into Federer's moment. He also coached Pete Sampras in his twilight in the early 2000s, when Sampras'due south ranking was sinking and every loss brought a new round of questions about retiring. Sampras won the 2002 U.S. Open, his 14th Grand Slam title but outset in two years, and never played another lucifer.
The journeying to that championship, with those constant questions, was at times a roughshod experience, one that Annacone said could sow doubt in the mind of even a bully player like Federer.
Andy Murray, a three-time M Slam event winner and former earth No. 1, is going through it at present equally he tries to recapture his form after hip resurfacing. Murray, ranked No. 123, voiced his frustration concluding week later on a acme-tier win at the tournament in Rotterdam, holland.
"I feel like I'one thousand playing for my career now each time I step on the court, which is a motivation in some ways," Murray said at a news conference later on he beat Robin Haase of kingdom of the netherlands in three sets. "But it also adds a bit of extra stress."
How Federer manages that stress will go a long manner toward determining whether this comeback is a farewell tour or a viable effort to compete for the biggest championships, especially Wimbledon, where Federer has been at his best because he is and so practiced on grass. He will play in Doha this week, and then perhaps in Dubai, simply he has not committed to the spring clay-court season, which concludes with the French Open.
Early on, it'southward a good bet that he is going to make enough of uncharacteristic errors. He will shank the occasional forehand, rim some backhands and struggle to boom his targets on his serve or when he fires at a sideline.
"Expectations are actually depression, merely I hope I can surprise myself," Federer said.
For him, this comeback was more about regaining his health than winning titles. Of course, he had conversations during the by twelvemonth about whether embarking on this battle to recapture his sometime cocky at 39 was a fool'due south errand. But, as he saw it, he needed a healthy knee anyway, and then he could ski with his iv children, cycle in the Alps and play basketball with his friends.
And if he could do those things, and so why not try to use that healthy knee to battle again on the tennis courtroom against the all-time players at the biggest events.
"The knee joint is going to dictate how long I can keep doing this," he said. "I know information technology is more on the rare side for an almost-40-year-old to come dorsum."
Like everyone else, he said, he is going to see what comes of the side by side five or six months. Then, in the fall, if he has played a meaning number of matches, he will re-evaluate what comes next. For now, though, he is healthy and eager to accept the courtroom. He knows the initial results will not be his best, he said, but when he rises each morning time he is full of hope.
"I don't experience like a broken man," he said.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/sports/tennis/tennis-atp-federer-return.html
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