Why Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard's Basel title run could change tennis for good, according to Andy Roddick

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Why Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard's Basel title run could change tennis for good, according to Andy Roddick

时间：2024-11-01 04:00 来源：未知作者：admin 阅读：次

By Jon Healy

Topic:Tennis

Mpetshi Perricard (right) comfortably out-served Ben Shelton, one of the most powerful players on tour, in the Basel final.

There are certain moments that take sports into a new era and it's often sparked by individuals almost "breaking" the game.

Basketball had to change a bunch of rules to keep Wilt Chamberlain from averaging 100 points and 100 rebounds, swimming had to ban the 'supersuit' after just about every record in the book was broken in 2008 and 2009, and good luck finding a competitive high jumper using any technique other than Dick Fosbury's.

We could be witnessing one such moment in tennis, courtesy of 21-year-old Frenchman Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard.

Perricard started 2024 outside the top 200 but, heading into the last month of the season, he's cracked the top 30. And he's done it with a unique approach.

Conventional wisdom goes that you should go all out with your first serve and if you fault, on the second, the aim should be to get the ball into play, ideally with a bit of spin to avoid the ball sitting up for your opponent to step in on and hammer.

Mpetshi Perricard — who is 203 centimetres tall, or 6'8" in the old money — has instead taken to ripping two all-out serves when he can.

Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard served like nothing we've seen before en route to his second title last week.

During his run to his second ATP Tour title in Switzerland last week, he averaged 209.2 kilometres per hour on his 126 second serves across five matches, according to the ATP website.

Almost 210kph. On average. On second serves.

For comparison, his opponents at the Swiss Indoors averaged 195.8kph on their first serves.

Those opponents included grand slam semifinalists Ben Shelton, Denis Shapovalov and Felix Auger-Aliassime, and three-time quarterfinalist and current world number 13 Holger Rune, who was ranked fourth as recently as last September.

"This guy is just a complete … he's just so different," Andy Roddick, one of the best servers in tennis history, said on his aptly named Served podcast.

It raises the question: Is it worth the risk to go full send on both serves?

Audacious players like Nick Kyrgios have tried it at various moments, often surprising opponents who have stepped a little closer to receive after a fault, but none as often or as successfully as this.

"Perricard can just take the racquet out of your hand," Roddick said.

Roddick said multi-slam winners like Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner would rather face someone ranked higher but with a more conventional game, particularly in the early rounds of a slam.

The retired 2003 US Open winner said Mpetshi Perricard could be a revolutionary in the sport.

"There comes a time when people change the game and it's not always a grand slam champion," he said.

He pointed to the likes of former coach Jimmy Connors using the steel Wilson T2000 racquet (although Billie Jean King played with it first in the late 1960s), Boris Becker bursting onto the scene with his powerful game and winning Wimbledon as a 17-year-old in 1985, and 22-time major champion Rafael Nadal taking it a step further with his extreme top spin.

With his power and accuracy among the best in history, Roddick said he himself toyed with the idea of hitting "two first serves" during his playing days but couldn't bring himself to do it.

"I think this is the first one where it's a real conversation where it is statistically responsible to hit two first serves," Roddick said.

"Is he going to win 60 per cent of his points if he hits two first serves? He's gonna lose like 7 per cent of points if he makes it.

"Someone's gonna do it. It is gonna happen. I think this is the guy that's gonna do it.

"He's gonna change something in what we think the rules are in tennis. It's gonna be fun to watch because he's gonna flip some stuff.

"Perricard, I'm telling you, it was an eye-opening performance this week," he added.

Even for Mpetshi Perricard, the Basel run was something of an outlier in terms of speed.

He hasn't quite hit those sort of numbers every time he steps on court, but it gave us a hint as to the sort of havoc he could wreak on tour.

Starting a point right, ideally avoiding a rally altogether with an ace, is the easiest path to holding serve

Despite the dominance of the Big Three (or four including Andy Murray), through the 2010s we saw monster servers like Milos Raonic and Kevin Anderson make shock runs to major finals, while the dominoes fell neatly for similarly enormous Croatian Marin Čilić to power to the 2014 US Open title.

Tomáš Berdych and Juan Martin del Potro similarly weaponised their size to send down bombs and start things off on their terms.

Mpetshi Perricard's Basel run compares favourably to randomly chosen title runs by big-serving Ivo Karlović in Los Cabos 2016 and John Isner in 2017 in Atlanta, where he won six of his 16 career titles.

The speed metrics aren't available for those tournaments, but his win percentages on first and second serves are right up there.

He also served 109 aces and 15 double faults — a ratio of 7.3 to 1 that is just behind Isner's 8.7 and streets ahead of Karlović at 3.6.

And, unlike Isner and Karlović, who stand at 6'11" and 6'10" respectively, Mpetshi Perricard wasn't broken once in Switzerland. In fact, he only faced three break points all tournament, and they all came in the same match.

Bearing in mind that the Lyon-born sensation was a regular on the Challenger circuit as recently as May, matching it with those established serve bots is remarkable. As he adds to his game, almost anything is possible.

The Frenchman backed up his Basel crown, his second trophy after winning on home clay in Lyon in May, by beating US Open semifinalist Frances Tiafoe in the first round of the Paris Masters.

He also beat Shelton on grass in the lead-up to Wimbledon, where he reached the fourth round as a lucky loser from qualifying.

With his career still in its infancy anything is possible for this budding French star.

And, even if he doesn't turn into a major champion, we'll always have Basel.

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