Forget themantra: rallies on clay are actually no longer than they are on hard courts Brain Game Tennis
CraigO’Shannessy says that ‘first-strike’ tennis is the game to adopt on all playing surfaces
Craig runs a tennis strategy website at www.braingametennis.com. This is an extract fromhis online ‘Dirtballer’ course. Craig is the strategy analyst for the ATPWorld Tour, Wimbledon, The New York Times, the Italian Tennis Federation and the players Matteo Berrettini, Jan-Lennard Struff and Alexei Popyrin Q uestion everything. Once you put everything on the table for examination, once you begin the quest for data over Question everything. Which leads us to one of the most shocking pieces of data I have ever researched. The 2015 Australian Open was where it all started. The first time I was able to get any data from Roland Garros was in 2016. I gathered
myths and guesswork and folklore and other people’s opinions, then your mind is open to exploring new ideas that others may think flat- out ridiculous. Just the very thought of stacking clay-court rally length up against the hard-court equivalent seemed like a colossal waste of time. We all know that points on clay are always much longer. Don’t dare challenge the idea that grinding and consistency is omnipotent on clay. There are methods and systems and ideologies that form the pillars of very influential “coaching systems”.
all the rally length data together and stared blankly at the results. My jaw hit the ground. At first, I didn’t believe the numbers were correct. Surely I had made a mistake. The first data set that I saw focused on rally length in men’s singles matches at the 2015 Australian Open. It showed that 70 per cent of the rallies were up to four shots long, 20 per cent were rallies of between five and eight shots and 10 per cent were rallies of nine shots or more.
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