When you watch a match like Federer vs. Berdych, today’s semifinals, you see how each player works the strengths and weaknesses of the other player.

Let’s start with Berdych.  Berdych has a pretty big serve, but his strength is his forehand.  He hits one of the hardest, yet most effortless forehands.  He can hit it inside-in, inside-out, and sharp cross-court.  In a way, he’s much like Federer.  When he’s on, he’s often hitting quite a bit harder than his opponent.  His weakness is his footspeed.  He’s not lumberingly slow, like Isner or Karlovic, but he’s fairly slow.  Against most players, this is not such a big deal because they are willing to exchange rallies with Berdych rather than play aggressive.

Berdych also likes to be aggressive on return of serve so he can get ahead in a point.  If he can get a weak reply, he’ll attack.  He’s OK at the net, though he could be better.  He certainly doesn’t mind attacking the net.

Federer is rather similar to Berdych.  He also tries to dictate with his forehand.  He probably doesn’t strike the ball quite as hard as Berdych, but he is more aggressive than Berdych.  Federer has his slice backhand as well, and this gets the ball down very low.  Federer is a great placement server.

Federer’s game plan was to push Berdych to the edges.  He really wanted Berdych on the run as much as possible because Berdych doesn’t play as well if he lacks time to set up.  This meant he wanted to do to Berdych what Berdych was doing to Murray.  Use that forehand to pull his opponent wide and elicit weak shots, and pretty much Federer was spot on all day.  While Murray didn’t mind playing long rallies, Federer was looking for weak shots up the middle and trying to pounce on it.

People often say that Federer’s style is one that allows him to stay healthy longer.  They talk about his effortless footwork that makes him appear to glide over the court (by contrast, Berdych prefers tiny steps taken fast, while Federer generally prefers bigger steps).  But they overlook one important aspect of the Federer game.  Fed like short points.  Fed can look at a guy like Djokovic or Nadal and to a lesser extent Murray, and see players that are willing to play 20 strokes to win a game.  Fed prefers to win points within 6-10 shots.  This forces him to have an aggressive mindset and to end points quickly.  He rarely has 3 hours matches.   Even a three-set match often last under 2 hours because of how fast he plays.  It doesn’t hurt that his serve is so accurate that he wins games in a little over a minute.

Berdych did look a touch slow today, after a long match against Murray.  Federer won the first set off one break, but had chances to break and didn’t.  In the second set, he broke twice, including the last game.  Berdych didn’t have the feet to keep up with Fed, but even if he had, Federer was pressuring him all the time.  The commentators noted an interesting stat where the average Berdych groundstroke was 10 kph less than how hard he hit it against Murray reflecting the difference in time that Federer allowed Berdych to hit vs. Murray.  Murray is not used to applying constant pressure against an opponent unless it’s Nadal.

Final score: 64, 63.

Tsonga-Isner

You have to give Isner credit.  For a guy his size and his speed (not terribly fast), he finds ways to win.  Sam Querrey ought to be the better player.  He’s got a huge serve.  He’s much faster off the ground.  But Isner fights.  I think he also gets great coaching that allows him to play his opponents smart.  Isner knows his speed is a liability, so he needs to hit big shots when the opportunity arises, mostly off his forehand.  He’s even picked up a few finesse shots.  He has a decent drop shot, not great, but not awful either.  He knows he should get to net to volley.

Tsonga’s strategy was somewhat similar to Federer’s strategy against Berdych.  Hit big shots and take advantage of Isner’s footspeed.  However, a few things worked in Isner’s favor.  Isner has a bigger serve than Berdych, and I think he fights harder.  Tsonga is also no Federer.

Isner knew ahead of time that the match would be decided on holding serve.  To that end, Tsonga lost his serve just once and Isner didn’t lose serve at all.  Not that there wasn’t tense moments for both players.

The first set went to Isner, 63, off one break of serve.  Tsonga took the second to a tiebreak and won that handily, 7-1.  At 4-all in the third set, Isner found himself down 0-40.  He played two points off the ground where Tsonga just made errors before he hit a powerful serve.  Indeed, Isner took 5 points in a row to hold.  The two held serve comfortably until Tsonga, down 6-5 got up 30-0, then 40-15, but lost two points to take the game to deuce.  Isner then got three consecutive break points (which were match points).  Each time, Isner made some errors as Tsonga hit big.  Tsonga finally held.

The tiebreak again went to Tsonga as Isner gave up one mini-break, then another on a double fault.  Tsonga took the tie break, 7-3.

Finals Preview

In the final, Federer will meet Tsonga.  The two have actually met quite a lot this year.  This will be their sixth meeting in 2011.

The first met back in Doha which is the first official tournament Federer plays (he plays an exhibition in Abu Dhabi with Nadal before that).  Federer won in straight sets.  They met again in Rome which was the easiest victory Federer had over Tsonga.  Tsonga beat him where it counted, however, at Wimbledon in a five set match where Federer had exactly one break point and got his only break.  He won two more sets in tiebreaks, but eventually his inability to even come close to breaking cost him the match as Tsonga took sets 4 and 5 with a break in each set.

Tsonga then beat Federer again in Montreal.  However, Federer did get the win in the US Open in straight sets with Tsonga playing less than his best.  One reason for this may have been his five-setter against Fish.  Federer, by contrast, dropped only 3 games against Juan Monaco so came into that match pretty refreshed.

The finals is likely to favor Federer because Federer took only half the time to play his match that Tsonga took to play his.  While a three setter is less exhausting than a five setter (and it’s played indoors), it might give Federer an advantage.  Back in 2010, Federer easily beat Tsonga in the semis of the Australian Open.  Tsonga had played a five-setter to beat Djokovic in the quarterfinals and was perhaps a bit weary.  He’ll hope Tsonga is similarly weary.  Tsonga did get one benefit.  He didn’t have to play on Friday because Djokovic withdrew.  However, Federer didn’t spend that much time on court beating Juan Monaco either despite a somewhat close match score (it took about an hour for Federer to win that match).

It’s kind of hard to keep track of how many different Masters 1000 Federer has won or reached the finals since they have been juggled around a bit.  In particular, Madrid, which used to be an indoor tournament was converted to a clay event while Hamburg was demoted to an ATP 500 event.  Shanghai replaced the indoor version of Madrid.

Federer has won Madrid (indoors and clay) and reached the finals of Shanghai plus he’s won Hamburg.  So he basically gets credit for the two events these were.  He’s never won Monte Carlo partly because Nadal dominates this tournament and that it’s optional as far as Masters 1000 goes.  He has reached the finals, however.   He’s reached the finals of Rome twice, but never won it.  Again, Nadal sorta has something to do with this.  He’s also never played Rome that well.  Of the non-clay events, it’s Paris that has eluded him.

He’s never reached the finals of Paris, though to be fair, neither has Nadal.  He’s now in his first Paris final and he would like to beat a Frenchman just like Soderling did last year.

If Tsonga does recover or draw strength from the crowd, then he’ll need to serve well to take on Federer.  Federer served particularly well against Berdych.  In the first set, he was hitting north of 80% first serves, not giving Berdych chances to attack his second serve.  He’ll want to do the same against Tsonga.  Federer is hitting the ball well off the ground.  You can generally tell how well Fed is doing by how often he’s shanking.  These days, it’s quite a bit less than he was in 2009 and some of 2010.

If Tsonga holds serve or if Federer is off his game, then it could get pretty interesting.  Tsonga is a better mover than Berdych.  His forehand is comparable.  He might be the better server, though Berdych still serves quite well.  What’s hurt Tsonga is his health.  When he takes time off, he loses some of his stamina.

So I think Federer is likely to win in straights.  But then again, I didn’t think Isner would beat Ferrer, and he came quite close to beating Tsonga.