Tag: Pablo Cuevas

Tactical Analysis: Pablo Cuevas vs. Dominic Thiem, 2nd round Roland Garros 2015

One of the best matches of the early rounds in the 2015 edition of Roland Garros took place on Court 3 between the veteran and the 21st seed Pablo Cuevas and the much-younger, yet fast rising, Dominic Thiem from Austria. Both players, enjoying the high points in their career in the recent months, showcased why they are among the best clay-court players in the world. Endurance, topspin, footwork, and patterns preceded big serves and flat winners. As a bonus, spectators got to enjoy two of the most stylish one-handed backhands in the game. More importantly, two highly intelligent players continued to modify their game plans to outwit the other, taking the spectators through a crescendo in each of the four sets, thus the score 7-6 7-5 6-7 7-5.

In this article, I will mostly focus on the first set, only because going through the whole match would take too long to write. But no worries! There was plenty happening in the first set alone. Furthermore, the first set largely determined the outcome of the matches for reasons to be explained later.

When the match started, it quickly became obvious that both players planned to begin the match with their respective plan A’s. On the one hand, Cuevas would stay back, keep the ball deep, move Thiem around with his forehand, and get aggressive only if the opportunity presented itself. On the other hand, Thiem would dictate the rallies with his big forehand, go for winners if the ball came short, and avoid high and loopy rallies. Although each player held to equalize at 2-2, it was evident that Cuevas was winning the long rallies, and Thiem was feeling more and more pressure to finish the point, or else. Cuevas was beginning to impose his game, keeping Thiem on the run just enough to let his forehand direct the traffic of the rally’s pattern.

Cuevas, exactly in the position he prefers in rallies..
Cuevas, exactly in the position he prefers in rallies..

If you are in Thiem’s position at that stage, the last thing you want is your first serve to take a vacation. You need it for a few free points, and to set the tone for the next shot in the rally. Yet, it is exactly what happened to Thiem at 2-2. He only made one first serve that game, and was forced into rallies. In fact, Thiem knew going into that game that it was just a matter of time before Cuevas breaks him unless he can keep coming up with big serves and shots. And if you can’t hit big serves, it puts that much more pressure on your groundstrokes. In Thiem’s case, it led to errors that looked like unforced errors, but are in fact errors that resulted from the Austrian player putting too much pressure on himself due to his opponent flawlessly dictating every extended baseline rally up to that point (if only there were a way to keep stats on such categories). Here are the first two points of the 2-2 game:

And just like that, it’s 0-30. Thiem does recover to 30-30 thanks to aggressive play, but then tries to go for too much too soon again:

On that break point, Thiem attacks again, this time on a ball that allows him to step inside the baseline. Moving all the way to the backhand doubles’ alley, he unleashes a forehand winner (who does not do that nowadays anyway?):

Having gotten back to deuce, now Thiem finds himself stuck exactly in the kind of point that he would like to avoid. Cuevas pushes him around the baseline, never giving him a chance to get a firm grip on the rally and get on the offensive.

This is precisely why Thiem has been unloading on those early shots in the rally that led to errors. If he does not go for them, this type of point happens over and over again. In the ensuing break point (2nd one of the game), Thiem once again steps in to hit a big “jump” backhand but does not quite pull the trigger. So what happens? Cuevas punishes Thiem’s half-way-passive-aggressive backhand by sticking a winner right back to the open corner:

Now, you would think that at this point, Cuevas has taken charge in the match. He would have, except that in the next game, he pulls out of his “error” bag one of his 3 double faults in the match, and follows it up with a forehand drop volley in the net that he would make nine out of ten times. It is an uncharacteristically generous game by the otherwise error-free Cuevas that brought Thiem back to life.

Thiem did indeed come alive. For example, until then, Cuevas was exclusively serving to his backhand to start the rally, including a high-kick serve to the ad side, making the Austrian hit above the shoulder and from the outside of the court. But now, all of a sudden, Thiem begins to step in and catch the ball on the rise, immediately putting Cuevas on the defensive. Check out his placement on the backhand returns during the 4-3 game:

Thiem 4

Thiem 5

He even got to run around the backhand to hit some direct forehand winners (this one at 4-3 up, and 40-30 down on Cuevas’ serve):

Thiem Winner return 40-30 cuevas 4-3 Th

This led to Cuevas taking bigger cuts on his first serves, or using a strong outside kick as the first serve, in order not to allow Thiem to attack. This resulted in Thiem having to slice some of the backhand returns because he either had to stretch too far and/or too high to hit topspin, as is the case in this return below in the 6-5 game:

Thiem 6

In other words, Cuevas adjusted and responded to Thiem’s increasingly intimidating game by tweaking his serve, just enough to hold his serve and carry the set to a tiebreaker. Thiem still had the momentum going into the tiebreaker, and definitely looked like he was on his way to a 1-0 lead in sets, when he went up 5-1 in the tiebreaker. Check out how Thiem punishes Cuevas for favoring his forehand too much and leaving too much court open on the deuce side at the 2-1 point in the tiebreaker:

Thiem gets a commanding 5-1 lead in the tiebreaker. Then, for one reason or another, he gets passive for the first time in the tiebreaker and lets up during the rally. Did he think that Cuevas lost hope at 1-5 and would hand the next two points to him? In any case, here is what happens that point:

Cuevas also wins the next point to get back to 3-5. Suddenly, it’s a different dynamic. Thiem feels the pressure, leading to this gag on the 5-3 point:

It is now 5-4 and what looked like a blow-out tiebreaker for Thiem has turned into a tight, tedious affair. It soon turns into a nightmare for him when this happens when he has set point on his racket at 6-5:

Yep! Thiem served his only double fault in the set (total of 3 in the match) on set point! The clip showed you Pablo’s subdued relief as if he were saying to himself “Wait! I saved a set point without ever having to hit a ball?”

At 6-6, the players change sides. Thiem, despite the disappointment, plays a solid, aggressive point, only to be passed by Cuevas. Pay particular attention to Thiem’s body language after the point before you read on:

From the end of that point until the beginning of the next, Thiem kept looking at his corner, talking and yelling to himself, seethed with anger over how he now finds himself a set point down after leading 5-1 in the tiebreaker and double-faulting on set point. Yet, here is when youthful enthusiasm can help you. You can mumble and whine for the full 20-to-30 seconds between two points, and still come up with the goods once the ball is in play. Watch how Thiem, still talking to himself few seconds before the point begins (continuous since the end of the last point above), plays his best point of the tiebreaker:

But it is not enough as Cuevas wins the next point to earn another set point at 8-7. This time, the veteran capitalizes on it when Thiem cracks on the very shot, the forehand from the backhand side of the middle, that has worked for him so well for the most part of the first set:

First set goes to Cuevas. How important was that? It was devastating enough for Thiem to temporarily lose focus and go down 0-3 in the second set. It forced him to play catch up the rest of the second set and the match. He did eventually get the break back, but still lost the second set 7-5. Thiem’s mental maturity is far ahead of his biological one. Most young players would have fallen apart after losing two sets like these against a seasoned, seeded player in a Major tournament. However, Thiem found a way to extend the match to a fourth set, playing a much smarter tiebreak in the third set (did go up early again, this time not letting up). Cuevas, unfazed by the length of the match, or the challenge from the talented Austrian, kept his cool and came up with the goods (which, in his case, means that he turned error free) in the latter stages of the fourth set to avoid a fifth one.

The match lasted 3 hours and 51 minutes. If the analysis above showed anything, Thiem and Cuevas do not just have plenty in the tank to survive long duels on clay, but also the I.Q. power to make them entertaining. The “chess” part of the first set was a fascinating “intangible spectacle” while the tangible ones such as stroke production and execution, tremendous agility and speed, and creative baseline tennis while maintaining consistency added the icing on the cake.

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ATP Istanbul Open Wrap-Up

Part 1: Cuevas and Federer engage in a cerebral duel in the final

While the level of play never came close to the kind of spectacular tennis one would expect from the number 2 player in the world and one of the better clay-court specialists in the top 30, the spectators at the Garanti Koza Arena and others watching on TV witnessed a fantastic chess battle between the two players. At the end of the day Roger Federer prevailed with a 6-3 7-6 win, and lifted the winner’s trophy at the inaugural TEB BNP Paribas Istanbul Open.

Cuevas came out with a simple and expected plan. He would stay solid from the baseline, work Federer’s backhand, and win through consistency. However, Federer sent a firm message from the very first game that he was not going to submit to Cuevas’ plan A. Whenever Cuevas tried to engage in backhand cross-court rallies that have worked so well for him in his previous matches, including his upset of Grigor Dimitrov in the semi-final, Federer would either run around and accelerate his forehand, or switch the pattern with a down-the-line backhand or a drop shot. In his post-match press conference, Federer did say that hitting his backhand down-the-line was not part of his main game plan because he saw that “Grigor did it and it didn’t work for him.” Nevertheless, the fact that he avoided more than one or two cross-court backhand rallies (something from which he usually does not shy away), whether intentional or unintentional on his part, did negate a pattern that would have favored the Uruguayan player. Let’s remember that Cuevas hits a heavy topspin backhand and that pattern would have forced Federer into hitting several backhands in a row above the shoulder level. Federer also stepped inside the baseline often, rushing Cuevas into mistakes. Add to the mix a few surprise serve-and-volley attempts and the Swiss was already up a break at 3-0, before Cuevas could gain any footing in the set.

Seeing that his Plan A is getting him nowhere, Cuevas began to go for more on his forehands, step inside the baseline, and even attack the net when Federer’s shots landed short. The adjustment did work enough to level the play in the set, except that he was already down a break. He then faced a bigger issue: Federer was having his best serve day of the tournament and collecting two or three points per game just on his serves. Federer said after that he felt his serve was the one thing that worked well for him throughout the week, but added that he served best against Cuevas.

Second set picked up where the first ended. Cuevas continued to depend on his plan B, while Federer got more and more aggressive to push his opponent back and gain the upper hand once again. Both players won their serves until Federer drew first blood at 3-3 to break Cuevas’ serve. Most people thought the match was over when Federer jogged to his seat straight from having hit his volley winner and broken Pablo’s serve (see picture below).

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Federer jogs to the bench after hitting the winning the volley to go up 4-3

Cuevas would not fold. At the 4-3 and 30-30, Cuevas won two points that probably corresponded closely to his original game plan. They were both fairly long rallies in which Federer looked to close the rally with risky shots to the corners, Cuevas running them down and making Federer hit the extra shot, and the Swiss finally making the mistake due to impatience. It was now 4-4 and back to being on serve. However, Cuevas stuck to playing aggressive for two reasons: first, it got him to level the play when he was initially being pushed around, and second, he was feeling some pain in his arm, enough to have it massaged earlier and to motivate him to keep the points shorter.

From 4-4 on, it was anybody’s set. Once the players arrived to the tiebreak, everyone thought the quality of tennis would reach a new plateau. It never happened. In fact, both players probably chalked that tiebreaker down in their notebooks as one to forget, quickly! From 4-3 to Cuevas in the tiebreaker to the end of it, it was mistakes galore for both players. At 4-4, Cuevas had an easy put away the service line, and shanked the forehand almost into the stands. At 6-4 and two match points, Federer made two direct unforced errors, and then again one at 7-6, in the third match point.

Cuevas had three set points himself, one of which was another forehand that he would have probably made in his sleep. In fact, the only spectacular point of the tiebreaker came on a backhand return winner that Federer hit on a set point for Cuevas, but one that he later called “lucky, because the ball bounced off the line.” Federer admitted that he reflexed the racket into the ball due to the awkward bounce and it somehow turned into a winner when it could have easily gone “to the stands.”

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“Lucky shot” – on the return winner on set point

At 11-11, Federer served and volleyed, hitting the most terrific “intentional” shot of the tiebreaker: a diving low backhand volley on Cuevas’ low return that landed deep in the opposite corner of the court, completely catching Cuevas off guard. He was moving forward, thinking Federer would either miss the volley or barely get it over the net. Instead he found himself sprinting backward and to the backhand corner to retrieve the ball. He did, and Federer won the point on the next, much easier shot. Federer finally closed the curtain on the next point on a Cuevas error. You could see the exhilaration on Roger’s face when he won the match point. He came to Istanbul with the goal of getting some miles on clay under his shoes, and he accomplished his goal while earning his 85th career singles title.

Part 2: Parting shots

Unfortunately the parting shot of the tournament for the spectators live at the tournament was the trophy presentation. Why unfortunately? Because a portable well was put up for the presentation, in front of which the ceremony took place, and in the back of which half of the stadium who paid the same amount of money for corresponding tickets as the other half of the stadium, were denied the trophy presentation. How did it look to those who happened to be on the “wrong” side? See the view below:

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The view from behind the “portable wall of denial”

Next time, please find another way to show the sponsors’ names on TV. Many other tournaments have found ways to have the trophy presentation, showcase the sponsors names, and yet not put up a “wall of denial” basically disrespecting half of the spectators who came to the stadium, not knowing that they paid for the match only while others earned the right to see the match and the trophy presentation for the same price.

One small negative note goes to the spectators who pass as “tennis fans” but who are really no more than “I-am-here-so-I-can-say-I-saw-Federer” fans. There is something wrong when there is a tennis fan who would be happy to buy a ticket to watch every match, yet he/she can’t, because some person bought that ticket, came and watched half a set of Federer (probably because he/she couldn’t care less about the game of tennis that they half understand) and left, leaving the seat open. There is also something wrong when the organizers succeed in bringing an elite player, a star player, and a few great clay-court players, and yet Federer plays to an almost-filled stadium, while Dimitrov, half an hour later, plays to only half full arena (in the case of semifinals), or no more than 2000 people (in the case of quarterfinals). Next time, dear Turkish “tennis fans”, please treat the tournament as tennis fans and not a showcase event where one earns the title “cool” if he/she attends it.

Major kudos to Federer, a true professional who fulfilled his role as the main actor of the tournament, not only by reaching the finals and putting his name on the winners’ list for the future to come (I don’t even want to think what the attendance would have been if he got upset in the semis and the final match featured Cuevas vs. Schwartzman), but also by engaging in the scheduled activities with enthusiasm, running the kids’ clinic more efficiently by himself than anyone else I have ever seen, becoming basically the advertising face of Istanbul for several days through his facebook and press conferences, and doing everything he can to promote the tournament.

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Roger not turning down anyone for an autograph after matches, including the final Sunday

Despite all its problems this year (see previous posts this week), I remain hopeful that they will be addressed and that the necessary measures will be taken so that next year tennis can become the center of attention. I know there are capable people in position of authority who should manage to turn things around and avoid these errors in the future. But they must galvanize everyone around them to follow their lead. One cannot bank on a super star to come every year and carry the tournament on his shoulders: Federer and this 2015 edition was the exception from that standpoint, and not the rule.

I would like to thank readers for following MT-Desk throughout the TEB BNP Parisbas Istanbul Open. For now, it looks like the next live coverage will be the French Open, however stay tuned for regular blog posts on the tour at any time, and click here to follow MT-Desk on Twitter for continuous tweets from the tennis world.

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