Marco Bitran: How To Analyze Any Tennis Match

By Alex Tes

There are some things you have to keep in mind to make a competent analysis of all key moments leading to success.

Physical data

First comes analysis of the player's physical form. It's vital to know how tired he is. And you won't understand it watching the match online. It's necessary to know how long he has been in play before this very match. Such components as ranking position, current physical form and motivation sink in the scale if the night before an athlete played a very exhausting match, you can also see it in statistic. Most probably, he'll produce a large number of mistakes, few serve winners and bad movements.

Of course, there are some exceptions. Think about such sturdy guys as Nadal or Ferrer. They deal well with physically tough matches. But they are unique in men's tour.

Players peak form

It's not a secret that tennis season is not a short grind and it's very hard to maintain peak form all season long (next to impossible, I'd say). So many athletes peak at different portions of the season. Nadal, for example, shows his best during the clay season. Andy Murray is always at his best immediately after Roland Garros, i.e. second half of the circuit.

Head to head records

Some tennis players cause troubles to one style of opponent more than they do to others. Nadal is very uncomfortable for Federer. The Swiss can make up no answers to the Spaniard's questions. Another example is Berdych-Isner. The American is the best opponent possible for the Czech to face off in tour, both mentally and tactically: Tomas has no troubles receiving John's serves.

Match surface

Different players play differently on different surfaces. "Clayers" perform better on slow courts, "servers" - on fast ones. There are also many all-courts athletes showing good results on any type of courts. Thus, a "server's" winning chances against "clayer's" on clay courts will be very shadow. The above is also true if a "clayer" faces a "server" on a fast court. Sometimes it's more useful to consider the players' specialization with no regard to their ranking. It's also worth paying attention to head-to-head encounters: if, for instance, one opponent leads with a 4:0 advantage in h2h meetings, but all victories were achieved on a suitable surface, these victories will become irrelevant when the surface is changed. We consider it to be a very important moment.

Read more in our article.
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