Which Serve Tactics are We Likely to See From Top Men’s Seeds at the French Open?
When players take to the clay courts of the French Open this week, one of the biggest tactical challenges they will face is the loss in serve advantage. With the slower pace and greater bounce on the red dirt in Paris, there will be even greater pressure on servers to choose their serve locations wisely. Smart serve locations are ones that will compromise the receiver’s shot execution and ability to get into a rally, and also present enough variety to keep the receiver guessing. In this article, we delve into the clay court serve patterns of the top 8 seeds at the 2023 Roland Garros to see who may have the most complete serve strategy for this year’s clay court Grand Slam.
We can get some insight into the serve location tendencies of the top seeds by examining their patterns in recent clay court matches. To do this, we summarize the charted serve locations from the Match Charting Project (MCP). One of the cool things about the MCP data is that the serve direction of every serve (first and second) is charted regardless of whether it was a fault. In this way, we can get at a server’s intentions with respect to location, even when their execution was wanting.
To summarize serve tendencies, we will first look at the ‘T to Wide ratio’. From Figure 1, we can see that nearly all serves have a clear preference to serve wide. This is especially true on the Ad side when a wide serve would be to the backhand of right-handed receivers. Holger Rune and Carlos Alcaraz show some of the stronger wide tendencies on both court sides. While Jannik Sinner has the most polarizing strategy by court side. To Deuce, Sinner is the only player who is more likely to serve down the T, going to the T with 10% greater odds. On Ad, Sinner is a wide-serving machine, preferring to go out wide nearly 3 times more than down the T.
When it comes to maximizing the serve advantage, a server not only has to master the execution of each serve direction but also the sequencing of these serves. If a server becomes too predictable – by routinely going to one direction, for instance – the receiver can begin to adapt and chip away at the power of the serve. A server who uses an even mix of serve directions is the least predictable. Between the T and wide, it is notable that Stefanos Tsitsipas and Novak Djokovic are two of the servers with the least predictable tendencies on first serve, and also two of the strongest first servers in this group.
Figure 1. Ratio of first serves ‘down the T’ and Wide on clay by court side for Top 8 seeds for the 2023 French Open.
We can’t overlook the role of serves to the body. Because a serve into the body requires the least change in position from the receiver, it would seem to fail to meet the brief of putting the receiver at a disadvantage. Now this may not be true of all body serves, depending on depth and the bounce of the ball. But even a less effective serve direction can create a surprise element that is still advantageous to the server. We see some evidence of this in Figure 2 as Alcaraz and Rune have some of the higher rates of body serves among the top seeds, and this could be a means of maintaining surprise despite a strong tendency towards wide serves. For most of the remaining servers, body servers represent less than 10% of first serves.
Figure 2. Frequency of first serves to the body on clay for the top seeds.
With the greater penalty for a fault on second serve, it isn’t surprising to see more conservative tactics. We can see this with much more predictable tendencies by court side, with servers going wide even more frequently to Ad and several servers – Andrey Rublev and Alcaraz – favoring down the T serves much more to Deuce (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Ratio of second serves ‘down the T’ and Wide on clay by court side for Top 8 seeds for the 2023 French Open.
There is also an increase in serves to the body, which roughly doubles in frequency for servers compared to the first serve frequencies. Interestingly, Casper Ruud has the lowest frequency of second serves to the body of this group, hovering around 20% on each court side (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Frequency of second serves to the body on clay for the top seeds.
One of the major takeaways from the tactical summary is the greater predictability of the serve patterns of Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz. With the absence of Nadal at this year’s Roland Garros, both players have a legitimate chance at a clay Major title. But transparent serve strategies could undercut those pursuits or put tremendous pressure on the rally game of each player, unless they find some edge in the execution of their preferred serves to each side of the court. Either way, the serve location approach of Sinner and Alcaraz will be one of the more interesting strategic storylines to follow over the next two weeks of tennis in Paris.