THE END OF THE ROAD for Roger Federer?
Grass is the surface Roger Federer cherishes the most. After Pete Sampras, he has been dominant in the run up to Wimbledon and of course in the championship itself. The first major blow he suffered was at the hands of Rafael Nadal in the 2008 Wimbledon, when he went down fighting in five long sets. But it is his performance in the tournaments before Wimbledon that helped him gain some momentum on grass. This year, however, he suffered yet another setback. It was in the shape of a loss to resurgent Lleyton Hewitt. Federer has an impeccable record, three hundred and fifteen wins as compared to only twenty four losses from 2004-2007 and henceforth only being defeated thirty five times for the next two and a half season. But with his loss in Halle, is it all going to change? Is he still as invincible as he used to be?
Roger Federer may have hoped to end the current season as world number one, but that was not to be. His loss to Robin Soderling in the quarter final meant Rafael Nadal promptly took over the throne by winning the French Open. The loss for Federer did not just mean a dent in his statistics but more so pushing him down to world number two. What made it worse was the fact that Federer was on course to break yet another record; longest number of weeks at the helm of the rankings. Currently he holds the record for being consecutively at the number one spot for two hundred and thirty seven weeks, but in calculating the total number of weeks spent at the world number one spot, he lags behind Pete Sampras by just one week. He stood at two hundred and eighty five weeks before he lost his match and his spot.
Looking at the current rankings, Federer is only two hundred and twenty points behind Nadal. On paper it seems to be a slender lead. It seems easy to imagine that Federer can reclaim his place as he is better on grass than Nadal and can pull of a surprise at the US Open, but this is far from reality. Points which are calculated for any given season come with an expiry date of one year. Thus each player has to match their performance of the previous year in order to go ahead in the rankings. If any player performs worse than the previous year, then his ranking drops even lower. So had Federer defended his French Open title he would have replaced the two thousand points he gathered after winning last year’s French Open title. Since that was not the case his previous two thousand points now stand expired. Keeping this calculation in mind Federer will have to either match or do better than his performance last year. This is the only way he will be able to collect the all important points. All this may not be very easy considering Nadal has the upper hand in terms of point’s collection. Since he missed most of last season due to injury and did not perform well on the hard courts, he has fewer points to defend, leaving the room for him to garner many more. Looking the calculations, Federer needs three thousand two hundred and ten points more than Nadal to get right back on the top. In terms of tournaments it means Federer would have to win both Wimbledon and the US Open in addition to a Master’s title. It seems to be a long road ahead for the former world number one.
Looking at his loss at Halle, there is also another danger in the shape of Novak Djokovic. If Djokovic goes beyond Federer at Wimbledon and reaches the semi-finals, Federer will drop to world number three. It seems as if the former champion has much more at stake this season than just defending his titles.
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