Sep 10, 2007

The Roger Slam

So its back to a Roger Slam (defined as Losing to Rafa in French and winning the rest).Of course all this brings us back to the 'Roger-Pete' comparisons...while pete numbers dont look as good as rogers..i absolutely remember people complaining about pete dominating the tour thus making it boring...the same is happening with federer here....

If we continue with the comparisons, Two things come to mind after the last game.
  1. Roger is at the peak of his domination,like the 'Pete- Rafter' phase of 97-98, where sampras just managed to hold his own against Rafter.
  2. Roger is learning from Pete the ways to prolong his career,His much improved Serve was the main enabler for Rogers title defense. I think on the basis of groundstrokes alone, Nole and Davy'D seemed better.(It wasn't the case earlier).

So if we continue the analogy, we may see Federer strugglingin the next few years against upcming players like djokovic, ala how Sampras struggled with Safin and hewitt. However Federer will continue to win Slams for the next few years though i think the dominating phase is over.
P.S - Mytake on the Roger Pete debate-

I think, overall Roger has the better game, primarily due to his ability and results on clay. Pete though has the better career as of now. Remember Pete won his first slam when he was about 20 and the last when he was 31. Thats a long time.

4 comments:

  1. Another remarkable difference is that federer is much better than sampras in terms of the no. of unforced errors...though his service has improved a lot recently, still it is weaker than sampras...interesting post though

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  2. Yup, but sampras had his slam bang thing..he went for winners..fed sets up the point..

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  3. my take is that federer will be a much greater name than sampras when he finishes his career....but nothing can be compared to the sampras- agassi duel....hope nadal matures enough to give federer a tougher time in other grand slams also apart from french and wimby

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  4. U mayb true abt Fed but again, i m nt v sure..I think there is a bias in people of assigning greater weight to current generation players...Sampras's record now doesnt seems as impressive as it did when he was playing...

    Plus..Sampras Agassi was hardly a duel...Sampras beat AGassi more often than not

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