Will Hamilton: In my analysis of the Wimbledon final, I said that Andy Roddick's return of serve let him down. It was the reason Federer ended up winning the tournament in that tight 16-14 first set. Well, some folks disagreed with me, they said, it was actually Federer's serve that did the trick. He served so well that he earned those 50 aces as supposed to Roddick being unable to get a racquet on the ball just not stepping his game up on the return. A lot of folks pointed to a BBC news cast, a split screen they did where they had Federer serving out wide and they had him serving down the Tee, and what the split screen showed was that the toss was in the same place and the mechanics were the same, when he was hitting the ball. So, he couldn't read the serve, he didn't know where it was gone, Again, that was reason he got some many aces against Roddick. Roddick had no clue where he is hitting the serve. Well, what I did was, I went through the service stats for both those guys for the entire tournament.
The first round to the semis, I have appeared on the board and what I did was I added up the total number of aces you've Federer here, Roddick here. Federer hit 77 aces through the semi finals and Roddick hit 160 aces through the semis and I divided these numbers by the total number of first serves they got in. So Federer had a 374 serves in, Roddick was at 506 and what you get was Federer would hit an ace on 21% of this first serves and Roddick hit would an ace on 32% of this first serves. Well, in the final, Federer hit an ace on 39% of his first serves and Roddick hit an ace on only 16% of his first serves.
So, Federer was plus 18, he was 18 percentage points higher in the final than he was over the course of the entire tournament up to the final, but Roddick was 16 percentage points lower than his 32% ace ratio rate up to or through the semis, by the way 32% is amazing number. So what this tells me was that Roddick didn't step his serve or he is return game up. He allowed Federer 18 percentage points jump over his standard 21% over the course of the tournament. Roddick served great in the final, but Federer has got a good return, I mean he doesn't do much with it, but as he gets racquet on the ball, gets the ball and play. Keep in mind that, you know to go back to that split screen, Federer's services mechanics are going to suddenly change in the final. He doesn't have the same on readable serve against Tommy Haas in the semis, against Karlovic in the quarters and so on. He is going to put the toss on the same place, mechanics would be the same, you can't tell, which way it's going; yet he was only aced in folks 21% of the time. So, again I think what these numbers show because Federer was 18 percentage points higher on the final, was that Roddick wasn't getting it done when he was returning serve.
Now I'm interested to hear what you guys had to think of this analysis where you think this is accurate or not, so please post some comments below and let me know what you think, I'm looking forward to reading them.
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