Wimbledon Preview

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The 2011 Wimbledon Preview

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IntroductionWelcome to Wimbledon, the sun around which the tennis tours so fortunately revolve.

Editors’ PicksTennis.com’s finest offer a peek inside their crystal balls.

Isner-Mahut IISeven-time Wimbledon champ Pete Sampras on Tuesday’s highly anticipated rematch.

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Rafael Nadal

Maria Sharapova

Novak Djokovic

Serena Williams

Andy Murray

Andy Roddick

Caroline Wozniacki

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga

Venus Williams

Roger Federer

When It’s On . . .Tennis Channel, ESPN2 and NBC deliver this year’s action to the comfort of your living room.

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Do you wish there was more time between the French Open and Wimbledon? We’re guessing you do, considering that everyone does. The brief and sudden sight of tennis being played, so briskly and quietly, on grass always leaves us wishing for more. We know we can’t have it, even if we can’t exactly say why. The explanation we’ve always been given is that Wimbledon won’t move its dates farther from the French Open’s because it fits neatly into the BBC’s summer TV sports line-up, which also includes the British Open and a horse race. Of course, there’s at least one other reason that doesn’t need to be stated: Because it’s Wimbledon, the tennis sun around which the tours so fortunately revolve.

The upside, though, is that tennis gets to feel a little crazed and irrationally over-full for six weeks. We get done with one massive event—the one that we’ve been building toward for months—and yet we know that there’s an even bigger tournament just around the corner, with almost no build-up of its own. It makes no sense, but there’s an excitement to this particular moment that we’d all miss if the schedule ever turned sane.

Enjoy the preview,

Stephen TignorSenior Writer

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MEN’S CHAMPION MEN’S DARK HORSE WOMEN’S CHAMPION WOMEN’S DARK HORSE

Andy RoddickI’ve been calling for Roddick to win Wimbledon for years now, and have felt that he’s just one lucky break from earning that much longed-for trophy—and second Grand Slam title of his career.

Peter BodoSenior Writer

Ed McGroganOnline Editor

Richard PagliaroSenior Writer

Andy MurrayMurray can win it if he plays with the clar-ity and tenacity he showed in claiming his second Queen’s Club crown. The fourth-seeded Scot must use his speed offensively and avoid the passive play that has plagued him in the past.

Rafael NadalThere are certainly compelling reasons to pick Djokovic or Federer, but Nadal has reached the second Sunday each of the last four times he’s played Wimbledon. Rafa has also won each of his last seven Grand Slam finals.

Mardy FishI’ve always felt that Fish ought to have at least one good run at the All England Club, given his facility and comfort with the two shots more valuable on grass than any other surface: the serve and volley.

Jo-Wilfried TsongaThe grass has slowed over the years, but Tsonga’s ability to play serve-and-volley ten-nis is still effective, as he showed in Queen’s Club: He slammed 25 aces while hurling his body around the court to beat Nadal en route to the final.

Stanislas WawrinkaHe’s been to the fourth round in each of his last three Slams. To go further than that at SW19, he’ll likely have to upset Murray, but the second-ranked Swiss has proven that he can beat anyone on the right day.

Maria SharapovaI don’t think either Williams sister will win. Sharapova must be on cloud nine and jacked up for a good Wimbledon after pulling her game back together so impres-sively during the late clay-court season.

Serena WilliamsShe may struggle to shed the rust from injury-induced inactiv-ity, but Serena owns the best serve in the history of women’s tennis, set a Wimble-don record with 89 aces last year and is riding a 14-match win-ning streak at SW19.

Serena WilliamsIdle for nearly a year, Serena was a game away from defeating Vera Zvonareva—the world No. 3—in the second round last week at Eastbourne. Until she’s on the los-ing end of “Game, set, match,” I’m going with the four-time champ.

Marion BartoliShe’s been to a Wimbledon final, and is coming off a French Open in which she reached the semis. If she can sustain the momentum and con-fidence she had at the French, she could pull off a stunner.

Daniela HantuchovaHantuchova has won 13 of her last 16 match-es. The 25th-seeded Slovak can be skittish at the majors, but she crushed Caroline Wozniacki at Roland Garros and defeated Li Na and Venus to reach the Eastbourne semifinals.

Sabine LisickiShe’s recently re-turned from an injury and has Serena in her quarter. But when Lisicki has played this year, she’s been good—and she just won the grass-court tournament in Birmingham without dropping a set.

Editors’ Picks

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Isner-Mahut IINever before has a first-round match between unseeded players who have never advanced past the fourth round of a major been as anticipated as this Tuesday’s Wimbledon match between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut. Seven-time Wimbledon champion Pete Sampas offers his insight on why we won’t—and will never—see a repeat of last year’s record 183-game match between these two men:

“There’s not much point in seeking technical reasons for how something like 70-68 could happen. Isner may not be one of the best returners on the tour (if he were, he might have found a way to break) and Mahut may have consistency issues (they might have enabled Isner to break). But none of that really mattered. It was a day when the two men fell into something like a trance. The longer it went, the more unlikely it seemed that either man could break.

“I’ve been in that trance-like state myself at Wimbledon. I know from my own experience (and from being across the net at Wimbledon from one of the most deadly servers of all time, lefty Goran Ivanisevic) that you can hold serve for what might seem like an eternity. You can go 10, 12, 18 service games without being broken, but eventually—long, long before that now-mythic 70th game of a fifth set—something gives. There’s no way we’ll ever see a score like that again.”

—Pete Sampras

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At some point, a great player is not just entitled but expected to ask himself, “Do I really need another (fill in the major) title?” That’s often the point at which he loses a little bit of that cham-pion’s edge. More than one observer has drawn comparisons between Rafael Nadal and Bjorn Borg, who quit the game at 25 (the age Nadal is now), for some of the reasons Nadal has been carping about lately—the degree of commitment the tour demands. Nadal just doesn’t seem as hungry and eager to prove (re-prove is more accu-rate) himself as he’s been in the past.

Nadal hasn’t lost to anyone at Wimbledon other than Roger Federer since he made his first final in 2006. He’s had some close calls, though—grueling five-setters with, among oth-ers, Robin Soderling, Philipp Petzsch-ner and then-237th-ranked Robert Kendrick. If Nadal’s game was persis-tently ragged and resistant to smooth-ing out for most of the French Open, the court he owns, what happens if the same erratic tendencies show up in his game on the grass at Wimbledon? The answer is, “anything.”

Rafael Nadal








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One of only three former champions in the field along with Venus and Ser-na Williams, Maria Sharapova is one of the WTA’s most mentally tough play-ers—she’s a winner, a warrior and a superior shot-maker who relishes the Grand Slam stage. When she’s at her best, she’s using her 6-foot-2 stature to control play on the strength of her screaming shots.

Sharapova, however, has been pained by shoulder and elbow injuries in recent years, and she is now five years removed from her last semifinal appearance. Since then, she has been vulnerable to early-round upsets, suf-fering second-round setbacks twice in the past three years. Mobility is not an asset, her second serve offers little margin for error, her low volley can be sketchy and she seldom hits smashes, making her net play suspect. The bottom line at Wimbledon is that Sharapova will need to serve with au-thority and play the type of first-strike tennis she showed in Paris if she’s to indeed emerge as a serious threat to return to the final for the first time in seven years.

Maria Sharapova








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Although he enters Wimbledon having won 43 of his last 44 matches, Novak Djokovic is somehow the man every-one suddenly seems to have forgot-ten. He lost to Roger Federer in the French Open semis, and you would have thought Djokovic fell off the face of the earth for the amount of hype he’s generated since then.

The person who benefited most from that loss was Rafael Nadal. Some of Rafael Nadal’s disillusion lately—flip back a couple of pages for more on that—probably can be attributed to the way Djokovic hunted him down this spring, even if the process was, for Nadal, just a taste of his own medicine. Wasn’t Nadal the one who was so hot on Federer’s tail, for so long, that we half-expected him to be served with a restraining order? In what seems the blink of an eye, the tables are vividly turned, and not in a way that Nadal appears to find comfortable. This isn’t Federer, bent on revenge, pushing him. This is an X-factor leaping out of ether to make life a little more compli-cated on Nadal than it’s been for years.

Novak Djokovic








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If there were any doubts about Ser-ena Williams’ chances at SW19, they should have been erased last Wednes-day. Far from her best, the Eastbourne wild card led top seed and world No. 3 Vera Zvonareva by a set and 5-3, despite having played one match—a 1-6, 6-3, 6-4 first-round win over Ts-vetana Pironkova in the first round the previous day—in the last 11-and-a-half months. Zvonareva is the second seed at Wimbledon, Williams is No. 7. Ser-ena is probably being shortchanged, based on her two matches’ worth of evidence last week and a career’s worth of grass-court dominance.

Zvonareva deserves credit for overcoming a physical opponent (Serena) and a mental one (herself) to win 3-6, 7-6 (5), 7-5. But it was hard to not talk more about Serena after the three-plus hour battle. It appeared as if she would prevail in straights, and in the third, rallied from 5-2 down—two breaks—to level the set at 5-all. The serve, which let Williams down in the following game, needs to improve if she’s to win Wimbledon. And there should be little doubt that she can.

Serena Williams







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It seemed as the AEGON Champion-ships at The Queen’s Club began two weeks ago that Andy Murray was caught in a dilemma: He wanted and needed matches on grass, but every point he played could poten-tially damage his injured ankle prior to Wimbledon. Those fears had vanished by Saturday, when Murray pummeled Andy Roddick 3 and 1 with a display of aggressive shot-making that we rarely see from the play-it-safe Scot. Murray hit running passing-shot winners and took huge cuts at forehand returns, as if he had all day to set up and see Rod-dick’s once-formidable serve.

Then Murray, after the easy win, did it the hard way last Monday, com-ing back to beat a sharp Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in three sets for the title. What does it mean for Murray? For the mo-ment, he’s gotten the natives’ hopes up coming into Wimbledon one more time. But with the 2011 ascendance of Novak Djokovic, Murray, as well as he has been playing for the last month, feels a step farther from the title than he did a year ago.

Andy Murray








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If the Murray-Roddick Queen’s semifi-nal a little more than a week ago was a harbinger of good things for one Andy, it didn’t portend anything good for the other. Once upon a time, Queen’s was the site of Roddick’s first win over Andre Agassi, in a match where the younger American equaled the world service-speed record at the time with a 149-mph serve in a, 6-1, 6-7 (5), 7-6 (6) win. While that match from just over eight years ago ended in a rousing, confidence-boosting victory for a kid heading toward the top, the one just over eight days ago made Roddick appear far from the elite of the sport.

What was different? On the sur-face, not a lot: Roddick played both matches in much the same way—serve big and then look to control the rallies by running around and hitting his forehand to either corner. An ag-ing Agassi couldn’t handle it; a Murray entering his prime was more than ready for it. In the first, Roddick was filled with the blindhope of youth; in the second, he looked simply blind-sided by the quality of his younger op-ponent’s game. The sport moves on.

Andy Roddick








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Caroline Wozniacki has already played 53 matches this season, and that schedule seemed to take a toll in Paris—she looked listless in a 6-1, 6-3 third-round loss to Daniela Hantucho-va, her earliest Grand Slam exit in two years. Her serve is attackable, and her topspin forehand can land short against the tour’s heaviest hitters.

Although the 2006 Wimbledon junior champ has yet to surpass the fourth round in four prior appearanc-es, she’s certainly capable of winning as the top seed on the women’s side. Desire and a determined defensive game built on consistent strokes and quick court coverage can make squeezing the ball past Wozniacki as challenging as slipping into the royal box. She has played high-percentage tennis in collecting a WTA-best five tournament titles this year and has reached the semifinals or better in nine of 13 tournaments. The key to Wozniacki’s success as Wimbledon will be whether she can create enough offense to combat the firepower from flat-ball hitters who have pushed her around the court at times.

Caroline Wozniacki








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It was a Queen’s final few would have predicted, what with Rafael Nadal and Andy Roddick (a four-time champion at the venue) in the mix, but the title ended up being decided last Monday between Andy Murray and Jo-Wi-fried Tsonga. And although Murray ultimately prevailed, 3-6, 7-6 (2), 6-4, could it be that we saw stirrings of champion fever in Tsonga, one of the tour’s more baffling and unpredict-able figures these days?

Tsonga leaped into prominence in 2008, when he belted his way to the Australian Open final and finished the year ranked No. 6. SInce then, he’s of-ten showed signs of being surprisingly “soft” for a ruggedly built, strapping kid of 6-foot-2. He seems to grow tired or lose focus in longer matches, and in smaller events, he has posted puzzling losses. Over time, people grew tired of waiting, or they were disappointed by Tsonga, who’s now ranked No. 19. They seemed to forget. Or give up. Perhaps this Wimbledon, one in which Tsonga is seeded 12th, will be the start of a new chapter for the talented but un-integrated player.

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga








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Venus Williams, who turned 31 on Friday, played her first official WTA match since the Australian Open last Monday in Eastbourne, and the way it went was a statement on why the game his missed both Williams sisters—and why it’s good to have them back. The air was damp and salty in the British seaside town, and Venus looked rusty, her forehand flying all over the place. Scrambling for one ball in the 11th game of the second set, Venus slipped on the baseline and did a split that was worthy of a break dancer. It was a heck of a way to play her first competitive match in four-and-a-half months.

All in all, the odds seemed stacked for an inauspicious return by Venus against eighth-seeded Andrea Pet-kovic, one of the arcing players on the WTA. Of course, Venus proceeded to win the match, 7-5, 5-7, 6-3. Two days later, she looked even more impres-sive with with a 6-3, 6-2 defeat of Ana Ivanovic, forcing the choir to sing yet another verse of that now-familiar tune, Never Count a Williams Out.

Venus Williams








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This year marks the 10th anniversary of the win that vaulted Roger Federer onto our radar: that epic five-set tri-umph over Pete Sampras in the fourth round at Wimbledon. Now a decade down the road, Federer will be within a month of his 30th birthday on the day of this SW19 final. He has won six of the last eight titles offered at Wimbledon, the tournament where he’s enjoyed his greatest success and where he’s most likely to add further to his major title count. It’s natural to ask, “Can Federer win Wimbledon again?”

The short answer is, “Of course.” He’s got six, why not seven? That would put him on even footing at Wimbledon with Sampras. The longer, more intriguing answer is: “Sure, but can Federer sustain the conviction that he can still do it, and is he pre-pared to deal with all the frustrations that may come with that effort?” You can’t overestimate the importance of that last question; how Federer answers it may determine whether he goes down in a blaze of glory or merely fades away into that warm glow of love and appreciation that he merits.

Roger Federer







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TVSchedule

DATE ROUND TIME (EST) NETWORK

Monday, June 20 Early-round play (live) 7 a.m. - 5 p.m. ESPN2

Wimbledon Primetime 7 p.m. & 11 p.m. Tennis Channel

Tuesday, June 21 Early-round play (live) 7 a.m. - 5 p.m. ESPN2


Wednesday, June 22 Early-round play (live) 7 a.m. - 5 p.m. ESPN2


Thursday, June 23 Early-round play (live) 7 a.m. - 5 p.m. ESPN2


Friday, June 24 Early-round play (live) 7 a.m. - 5 p.m. ESPN2


Saturday, June 25 Early-round play (live) 7 a.m. - 1 p.m. ESPN2


Sunday, June 26 Week One Highlights 5 p.m. - 8 p.m. ESPN2


Monday, June 27 Round of 16 7 a.m. & 1 p.m. ESPN2

Round of 16 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. NBC

Tuesday, June 28 Women’s Quarterfinals 7 a.m. & 1 p.m. ESPN2

Women’s Quarterfinals 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. NBC

Wednesday, June 29 Men’s Quarterfinals 7 a.m. & 1 p.m. ESPN2

Men’s Quarterfinals 10 a.m. - 1 p.m. NBC

Thursday, June 30 Women’s Semifinals 7 a.m. - noon ESPN2

Friday, July 1 Men’s Semifinals 7 a.m. - noon ESPN2

Saturday, July 2 Women’s Final 9 a.m. - 2 p.m. NBC

Sunday, July 3 Men’s Final 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. NBC

Editorial

Editor-in-Chief Scott Gramling Creative Director Ian Knowles Art Director Dennis Huynh Online Editor Ed McGrogan Senior Writers Peter Bodo Richard Pagliaro Stephen Tignor Editor-at-Large Tom Perrotta Editorial Direction 10Ten Media Advertising

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Wimbledon Preview