Less than 12 hours from now, Andy Roddick will have to put a plan into effect to deal with one of the toughest players in the business.

He and his braintrust have to figure out something he hasn’t had a solution to so far. Beat Roger Federer.

It’s not that Andy Roddick hasn’t tried, but he can only change his game so much.

How do you beat Roger Federer, and in particular, how do you beat him on grass, his favorite surface?

Let’s think about how Federer has lost recently. In general, Federer likes fairly short points. There have been players like Gilles Simon who have outsteadied Federer. If you can run down enough balls, then Federer will sometimes miss. In a sense, Nadal does this with Federer.

Nadal also likes to pick on Roger’s backhand. Roger has a pretty good one-handed backhand. It’s steady, it’s versatile. He can hit topspin. He can hit slice. However, it’s not the most aggressive backhand in the game. James Blake takes more chances. Tommy Haas has a pretty hard backhand. So does Richard Gasquet and Stanislas Wawrinka. Roger can occasionally get really nice angles, but he’s not going to overwhelm you with winners from his backhand.

This is one reason Roger likes to run around his backhand. While his backhand is solid, his forehand is a weapon.

The other way to beat Roger Federer, which is tough, is to play like James Blake or Stanislas Wawrinka. These guys play a bit like Roger Federer, and take their chances. They hope to make a lot of tough shots trying to hit the big shot before Roger hits them. This is tough because Roger plays this way, and he’s the best at it.

Few people try to serve and volley against Roger. This is mostly because few people serve and volley. Mardy Fish does it. Tommy Haas does it. That’s about it. Roger makes this tough because he likes to return serve very close in. Against Ivo Karlovic, he tries to block the shot up the line. He doesn’t have to take a full swing to deal with Karlovic. This may be one reason he has success against Roddick. Roddick has practiced more volleying, but he is not great at it. He did use it judiciously against Murray however.

Murray did do one thing that gave Roddick some trouble. Murray would take Roddick’s sharp crosscourt angles and hit it up the line. Murray won plenty of points doing this.

So what will Roddick do? Roddick has tried being aggressive against Federer and it hasn’t worked. More than likely, he will try to duplicate what he did against Murray and hope it works again.

The one big key for Roddick is handling Roger’s serve. Roger spent time getting his serve back to where he wanted it to be, that is, enough of a weapon that he would get a few free points off it. Roddick needs to at least be able to get a few second serves back into play. One thing he did against Murray was to attack his second serve. Roddick may try to do that again.

Ultimately, Roddick can’t change his game plan too much. He’s not likely to come with an Ashe strategy where he tried to feed Connors junk to attack his weakness. Top players play so well. Federer has developed his game to remove weaknesses. In the past, weaknesses were weaknesses and players lived with them. Occasionally, you get someone like, say, Martina Navratilova that worked hard on her topspin backhand so that Evert, even when she attacked Martina’s backhand, found it came back time and again.

Roddick has to also hold serve. Roddick lost serve two times in the match against Murray, but on grass, even three times is a lot. He lost serve once in the second and once in the third. Haas gave Federer trouble because Federer had a really difficult time with Roddick’s serve.

Ultimately, any strategy has to be tempered with what Roddick can do. Roddick has worked on a drop shot but it worked well against Murray because Murray, when he feels nervous, stands way back. He leaves the forecourt open up. Federer, on the other hand, is more like Agassi. He prefers to stand much closer to the baseline. Roddick will likely use the drop shot much less.

If Roddick wins, it’s likely to be very close. One can hardly expect Federer to easily fall, short of (one hopes not) an injury. Federer generally doesn’t have many bad days and usually plays better and better. One reason Federer does so well against Roddick is not so much his technical skill, but that Roger is a rhythm player. When he’s confident, he hits a lot more shots effectively. Against Roddick, Federer just feels confident. Not only has he beaten Roddick a ton of times, but he’s also been in the finals so many times, even against Roddick. If he gets a little nervous, he knows he can play well, and that settles him down.

So it may not come down to X’s and O’s, but come down to how good Roger feels. When Roger feels good, his shots simply flows. He is so talented, that he just goes for his shots and makes them. It’s a rare player, like Rafa, that can go toe to toe with Roger while Roger is playing well. And he is less vulnerable on grass than on clay where the high kicking shots bother him more than the lower shots on grass.

Roddick is competitive. He’ll want to win. But he knows his chances aren’t great. He’ll hope that all the training he has done so far will play out, and maybe he can win a set, or maybe even two. Perhaps he has a trick up his sleeve, but probably not. He will try to play smart, and hope that he plays as good as he can possibly play.

On a day where the US celebrates its indepedence from the tyranny of British rule, maybe Andy Roddick can find a way to break free of the mastery of Roger Federer. It’s the smallest kind of freedom, but one that Roddick will be more than happy to celebrate.