Breaking down what goes into winning in tennis, I (Craig) looked at 5 Grand Slams and everybody who won their match.
The way to understand this easily is think of 100 players and as a percentage, 100 is a nice round number. So, 100 players go out and play a match and they come back and we ask those 100 players:
Did you win your match?
And all 100 players say, “Yes, coach, I won the match.”
So, then we tell them:
“Well, you don’t know that we did this, but we had somebody sit on the side of the court and record did you win the rally in 0–4 or did you lose it? Did you win the rally in 5–8 or did you lose it? Did you win the rally in 9+ or did you lose it?”
So, you have this war of the match, but you have three different battlefronts of 0–4, 5–8 and 9+
So, you then ask the players, “Okay, you won. You may have won 3 and 3. You may have won 1 and 6. You may have won 6–4 in the third. You won the match.
Do you think you did correspondingly the same in winning the 0–4 and winning the 5–8 and the 9+ rallies and a lot of players will go:
“Well, yeah, I’m more proficient than my opponent. I’m probably better in all the rally lengths. I’m just a better tennis player.
Looking at everyone that won the match versus everyone that lost the match. It doesn’t show that at all. What it shows is that match winners correspondingly won the 0–4 rally length 91 % of the time. So, it almost goes hand in hand. Next, when you look at 5–8 match winners only won that rally length, winning 66 % of the time. So, it’s a massive difference. Lastly, 9+, which we revere on the practice court match winners won the long rally length 55 % of the time.
Remember, we’re starting at a 50/50 battle. So, everyone that won the match only won the long rallies, turning it into a 55–45.
If you win 0–4 it’s a 91–9
So, it’s a very crystal-clear analysis of winning if you want to win more matches.
You have to win 0–4 way more than long rallies, and that has a massive impact on the practice court where we spend 90 % of our time trading groundstrokes when we should be putting far more emphasis on the serve, the return, the serve + 1 and the return +1.
(Inspired by the podcast episode #76: “It’s not only about 0–4, but… w. Craig O’Shannessy on The Adam Blicher Show — Dissecting High Performance in Tennis)
Want to listen to the full episode: http://shorturl.at/jktA8
