Nadal and Djokovic get the blues in Madrid – and behave like drama queens as Federer wins

Faced with a new blue clay surface at the Madrid Masters tournament which turned out to be a bit quicker and more slippery than usual, the world’s two top tennis players both lost to countrymen they routinely beat – and then indulged in a mega-whine about the surface and threatened not to return next year unless it’s changed to suit their playing styles.

To be fair to them, the foundation layer had apparently been tamped down too hard, meaning that the individual particles of the top layer were behaving like ball bearings on glass.

By contrast, Roger Federer, who’d just had a five-week lay-off, admitted the courts were slippery – and then went on to win the title by beating Tomas Berdych in a real nail-biter yesterday. He promised, in his role as President of the Players’ Council, to consult fellow-professionals about the courts – but stressed that he’d be seeking the views of those lower down the rankings as well as the top blokes. The great man also reminded us that at the start of his career in the late 1990s players were expected to perform on wildly differing surfaces – hard courts were insanely fast, grass was very fast and clay was numbingly, paint-dryingly slow.

In that era (i.e. after 1978 when the US Open switched from grass to hard) , a career Grand Slam – i.e. winning all four major tournaments – represented a colossal feat. Sampras, Lendl, Borg, Connors and McEnroe were among the superstars who couldn’t manage it – only Agassi succeeded.

In the current era, Federer and Nadal have managed to bag all four, and one assumes Djokovic will join them at some stage by winning the French. But nowadays a CGS doesn’t even compare to the era when three of the tournaments were on grass, and Roland Garros was on clay – because you couldn’t get two more different surfaces. These days  the three main types of surface increasingly resemble each other. The French have speeded up their clay courts, the US and Australia have slowed down their hard courts, and even the Wimbledon grass has been rendered lethargic.

The positive to emerge from the spectators’ point of view is that they get to enjoy plenty of long rallies: gone are the days of crash boom bash grass court serve-and-volley tedium and the sort of clay court rallies where you could watch the start of a point, pop down the shops, and get back in time for the winning stroke. As for the top players, it means they don’t have to make massive adjustments to their playing styles over the course of the year – what works at Roland Garros will work at Flushing Meadows. This has enormously benefitted Nadal and Djokovic. The former wouldn’t have won a single tournament on grass or hard courts back in the ‘80s or ‘90s – and Djokovic’s somewhat metronomic perfection wouldn’t have counted for much on grass courts then.

The player whom this homogenisation has arguably harmed most is Federer, who has the natural genius to adapt to any playing surface – if things had remained as they were 15 years ago, he might very well have picked up a few more titles (although 78 ATP Tour titles is probably sufficient for any man).

The main negative for spectators is the sheer length of modern matches – sets are routinely taking an hour or longer to complete, despite the ubiquity of the tie-break system: the Djokovic-Nadal Australian Open final took almost six hours. The predictably benign nature of courts, modern racket technology and heightened fitness levels mean that 30-stroke rallies are pretty common – even on grass. Consequently, players need longer to recover between points, and, because umpires and tournament directors are becoming increasingly gutless about enforcing time limits, this is beginning to drive spectators nuts.

Personally, I watch most of my televised tennis time-delayed so I can whizz through the adverts – and I’ve even taken to fast-forwarding between points so I don’t have to see players go through the maddeningly boring ritual of wandering around aimlessly behind the service line, towelling themselves down as if they’ve just enjoyed a ten-minute shower, spending ages selecting two balls from the six available as if they were choosing which Fabergé egg to spend a million quid on, setting their feet just so, then bouncing the ball as if they’re actually taking part in a ball-bouncing contest rather than a tennis match. Watching six hours of this stuff live – no matter how exciting the play is in between – would reduce me to a frothing rage. Judging by the texts and emails received by the Sky tennis team last week, my reaction is fairly standard – one English couple who were in Madrid said they’d walked out during the third set of the Nadal-Verdasco confrontation because of both players’ ridiculous time-wasting tactics (Nadal has always been the worst offender and Verdasco decided to out-do him for once).

The players’ answer to this criticism, by the way, is that, when you’ve played a 36-stroke rally, you need some extra recovery time. Yeah, but that’s the point – part of the challenge should be deciding when to expend that much energy on a point. Hell, if you’re always going to be allowed enough time to get your breath back, you never have to decide when to conserve your energy by forcing the issue and going for a big shot. Eventually, every match becomes a war of physical attrition rather than one of talent – and this isn’t boxing, it’s tennis.

Enforcing the 25-seconds-between-points rule and forcing players to decide when to put their all into a point would improve a sport that's already doing pretty damn well – and would reward genius rather than muscle: it would favour the likes of Federer, Murray and Tsonga – players who routinely do the unexpected - rather than the likes of Nadal, Djokovic and Ferrer, who do the expected (albeit supremely well). It would also give other top players more of a chance of winning Masters 1000 events – or even slams.

I’d love to see more surfaces like Madrid’s – the occasional fast grass court and blisteringly-paced hard court would come as a relief: watching brilliant players figure out a problem is one of the joys of the sport – watching one of them trying to simply outlast the other is starting to lose its lustre. But I have a compromise suggestion: if the top players want to play all their matches on courts that all behave in exactly the same way, let’s get them to agree to a maximum fifteen seconds between points. (Federer, of course, wouldn’t have to adjust, because, when serving, he takes no more time between points than Laver or Borg did.)

The Madrid Masters tournament isn’t that important in itself, but the brouhaha surrounding the courts this year has brought some major issues to the surface – and about time too.