Analyzing things has always been a passion of mine. It’s just how my brain works. I can’t help it. As I have slowly dug deeper into the advanced analytics of baseball and soccer, as well as the deeper tactical analysis of soccer I quickly realized how little tactical analysis exists. After reading an excellent book on the history and development of soccer tactics, I quickly realized how tennis analysis can be approached from a similar view. So I wrote this.
Soccer has gotten a recent boost largely from the folks at Opta who look to collect more in depth statistics. Just like baseball, these statistics are designed to properly analyze a player, and in turn, draw conclusions on what exactly makes a good player and ultimately what makes a team win. Juan Jose wrote an excellent piece over at The Changeover on how advanced statistics are slowly being introduced in tennis, in part to Hawkeye.
While this is a nice push, the piece largely reinforced the idea that statistics only tell part of the story. They can detect useful patterns but largely focus on how points were won and lost in the final stroke of the rally. This never really tells us how the players arrived at that point in the rally. Thus, we need to watch the match and analyze the patterns players are using (much like formations in soccer set the table for how patterns evolve).
It’s pretty obvious that I’m rather into this. I watch tennis with my thinking cap on, I’m constantly looking for patterns of decision making and patterns of execution. At times it can be a bit daunting/exhausting, but I often find myself discovering things that seem to fly entirely over commentators heads. I realize most people likely don’t watch tennis from this way, but might be curious as where to start, so…
Introducing the 10 Point Beginners Guide to Tennis Tactics! Over the next 10 days, I will have a single post on something to watch for tactically when watching a match, and specifically how to interpret it. Tennis matches are nothing more than a series of repeated decisions on the manipulation of spin and space.