Roger Federer’s credentials as one of the greatest tennis players of all time is still an open book. But his place among the sport’s elite is already established around names such as Pete Sampras, Bjorn Borg, Ivan Lendl and Guillermo Vilas.
When Federer plays Jarkko Nieminen of Finland in the third round at the Australian Open on Friday, the 23-year-old Federer will be looking for his 24th match win in a row — all on hard courts.
That will tie him with John McEnroe for sixth place on the all-time list of consecutive wins on hard courts. Pete Sampras is the leader in that category, having won 34 matches in a row on hard courts — on two different occasions — in a career that included 14 grand-slam singles titles.
Last year, Federer won 23 matches in a row during a season that included grand-slam titles at the Australian Open, Wimbledon and the US Open. It came on three court surfaces — grass, clay and hard court — and his 74-6 won-lost percentage of 0,925 was second only to McEnroe’s 82-3 (0,965) in 1984.
Federer still has some way to go to catch Vilas, the Argentinian player whose 46-match win streak is the standard for all court surfaces. Lendl won 44 in a row on all courts, followed by McEnroe with 42 and Bjorg with 38.
In between are players such as Thomas Muster (35), Jimmy Connors (30) and Andre Agassi, the only other current player who can improve on his 26 in a row on all surfaces.
It was a strange twist that Federer’s 23rd straight win came in a match on Wednesday against Japanese player Takao Suzuki, who used a serve-and-volley game to upset Federer’s rhythm and cause some anxious moments for the Swiss star.
Sampras used a serve-and-volley game to win Wimbledon seven times, and — along with Rod Laver, Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzales, Boris Becker and, more recently Pat Rafter — used that game to great effect.
These days, the list is getting shorter — Britain’s Tim Henman, American Taylor Dent and Max Mirnyi of Belarus are the only current players to use a serve-and-volley game consistently.
That was a fact not lost on Federer after his tougher-than-it-looked 6-3, 6-4, 6-4 win over Suzuki.
”There’s not many left, yeah,” Federer said of the dearth of serve-volleyers. ”It gets more and more difficult. Players return better, pass better. You’re not allowed to miss any easy volleys these days. They cost you quite quickly.”
But Federer was happy to see a guy like Suzuki come to the net often and force him to hit ”great passing shots to beat him”.
”But it’s nice to see it still exists,” added Federer.
Federer entered this year on a 17-match winning streak, then won four in a row while taking the title at Doha 10 days ago. And that doesn’t include three matches he won last week at the Kooyong exhibition in Melbourne, including one over second-ranked Andy Roddick.
Last year, his 23 straight wins came over four tournament victories from June 7 to August 1. He lost two weeks later in the first round of the Olympic tournament at Athens to Tomas Berdych, then started his current streak, which includes his US Open title.
Federer has also won 14 consecutive tournament finals, a record he holds all by himself. He passed the previous Open-era record of 12 held by Borg and McEnroe at the Tennis Masters Cup last year and number 14 came at Doha two weeks ago. — Sapa-AP