by Andrea Scaglione
The Foro Italico is incredible tonight.
For Sinner’s match, there is a hugely excited Italian crowd: orange gadgets, wigs, signs, small acts of popular devotion. It no longer feels like just a tennis match. It feels like a kind of collective ritual around Jannik Sinner.
Sinner is playing Sebastian Ofner, and the only thing that comes to mind is this: if we put a red wig on Ofner, perhaps someone, and perhaps more than a few people, might mistake him for Sinner for long stretches.
That is where the problem lies. Not with Sinner, but with tennis. With its entertainment value, its beauty, its visible variety.
Around the court, the fun is certainly there. Italians are funny. There is also a magnificent sign: “Vagnozzi, orgoglio di Ascoli.” If you are not Italian, you will have to use Google. I am Italian, so I can say it without any problem.
The crowd is alive, colourful, noisy, inventive. The game itself, as so often lately, much less so. Not because the players are not strong. They are extremely strong. The problem is almost the opposite: they are extremely strong within a form of tennis that increasingly tends to resemble itself.
That is the paradox: in the stands, everything is happening and imagination is in power; on court, far less than there should be.
There is a curious misunderstanding in the discussion around Sinner. Because Sinner is extraordinarily strong, some seem to think his tennis must therefore be entertaining. As if technical greatness and the spectator’s pleasure were the same thing.
It is possible to recognise that Sinner is one of the strongest players in the world, perhaps the finest interpreter of contemporary tennis, while also finding his game rather unentertaining. The two things can coexist. In part, they even explain one another: Sinner takes today’s tennis to its highest level. If today’s tennis has become poorer as spectacle, his game ends up showing that more clearly than anyone else’s.
Of course, not everything is the same. Watching Sinner is not like watching Michelsen. Sinner does the same things in another dimension of precision, speed, anticipation and control. His tennis has a superior quality, a cleanliness the average tour player does not possess. Yet the point remains: if the grammar of the game narrows, even its finest interpreter remains inside that narrowing.
Contemporary tennis asks above all for a few things: serve, return, forehand, backhand, baseline pressure, the ability to take time away. These are immensely difficult things, often executed at an almost unreal level. But the problem of spectacle is not only about difficulty. It is about perceptible variety. And there, today’s tennis has a problem.
In other eras, players who seemed almost to be practising different sports coexisted on the same circuit. Borg and McEnroe. McEnroe and Lendl. Sampras and Agassi. Rafter and Agassi. Kuerten and Sampras. Young Federer and Henman. Santoro against almost anyone.
The point is not that Kuerten did not hit hard from the baseline. Of course he hit hard from the baseline. The point is that the tour allowed for more recognisable identities. There was the player who lived by serve and volley, the one who built from the baseline, the one who attacked whenever he could, the one who worked the ball on clay, the one who broke rhythm with touch. Even when two players both started from the baseline, they did not necessarily give the impression of belonging to the same family.
Today, differences still exist, but they are often differences within the same form. One player takes the ball earlier, one hits heavier, one serves better, one returns better, one defends better. All true. Yet the match far more often moves within a common structure: serve, aggressive return, baseline pressure, lateral recovery, the search for depth.
Modern tennis has not narrowed simply because racquets have changed. That is a convenient explanation and too easy to attack. It has narrowed because the relationship between risk and reward has pushed more and more players towards the same area of the game.
Serve and volley is the clearest example. It has not disappeared because nobody knows how to play a volley any more, nor because it never works. At Wimbledon, according to data collected by Craig O’Shannessy and cited by Tennis Majors, the percentage of men’s points played as serve and volley fell from 33% in 2002 to 5% in 2019; over the same period, however, the percentage of points won with that tactic remained almost identical, 67% in 2002 and 68% in 2019.
The data says something precise: serve and volley can still work, but it has ceased to be a primary language. It has become a variation, an intermittent weapon, something to be used when it surprises.
Tennis Abstract, using Match Charting Project data from 2010 onwards, reaches an even more cautious conclusion. In the men’s sample analysed, players won 66.8% of points played as serve and volley, but 72.2% of points when, under the same conditions of serve, tournament and opponent, they did not immediately come in behind the serve.
So the issue is not the single move forward. It is the convenience of building an identity around it. If coming forward remains useful as a surprise, but is no longer profitable enough as a foundation, tennis loses one of its great historical oppositions: the player who closed down space against the player who opened it with the passing shot. The match changes intensity, quality, speed; much less often does it change language.
The same can be seen in the modern forehand. Open stance is not the cause of a less varied tennis. It is one of the technical places where the transformation becomes visible. As the game has become faster, high-level players have increasingly used open positions to hit from the baseline, especially when they have to deal with lateral pressure and limited time. Biomechanical literature on the forehand stresses the role of the coordinated rotation of hips, trunk and shoulder in generating racquet-head speed. The modern forehand allows players to hit extremely hard even without stepping classically into the court.
Technically, it is impressive. From the point of view of spectacle, the effect is more ambiguous. If you can hit hard even from lateral positions, recover the court and immediately go again, turn a defensive forehand into a neutral or attacking shot without really changing the tactical design, many old alternatives lose weight. They do not disappear. They stop being central.
Wimbledon also tells this story. For years, grass almost naturally rewarded attack and approaches to the net. Since 2001, the tournament has changed the composition of its grass, moving to 100% perennial ryegrass, with a higher bounce and longer rallies. Le Monde noted that the last champion truly founded on pure attack remains Goran Ivanisevic in 2001, and that Federer already drastically reduced his use of serve and volley in the years that followed: according to the data cited in the article, from 313 serve-and-volley approaches in 2003 to 30 in 2006.
Wimbledon did not become slow by decree, and the transformation of tennis does not depend on a single cause. Yet the tennis result is visible: even the symbolic home of serve and volley became winnable, then dominant territory, for complete players whose greatest skill was above all the ability to control the baseline exchange. When Wimbledon changes, it is not only a surface that changes. The technical imagination of the sport changes.
Within this landscape, Sinner is perfect.
His game is not crude. It is not elementary. It is not technically poor. It is clean, quick, repeatable, devastating. He takes time away without seeming rushed. He finds depth without giving the impression of forcing. He turns defence into neutrality and neutrality into attack with astonishing continuity. He has a quality of impact that does not belong to the average player.
Yet he remains inside the same vocabulary. That is the point.
Sinner does not need to seek systematic serve and volley, constant variation, sudden attacks or sliced backhands as the foundation of his tennis. He can do those things, probably very well. But it is not convenient for him to build his game there. If he can dominate through anticipation, depth, pressure and quality of ball, why would he move towards less profitable solutions?
This does not make him any less great. It makes him the perfect player for this era. But something can be perfect and unsurprising. It can be technically very high and poor in changes of form. It can be admirable without becoming truly exciting for two hours.
Let us raid the Stadio dei Marmi: we will surely find a discus thrower. The best discus thrower in the world performs an extraordinary athletic gesture. You watch it once, perhaps twice, and admire the perfection of the movement. But if you had to watch two hours of discus throws, you would probably get bored. Not because the gesture is mediocre. Precisely because it is magnificent but repetitive.
Tennis risks something similar when it reduces its contrasts. If clear differences fade between the player who comes forward and the one who stays back, between the one who builds through touch and the one who builds through pressure, between the one who breaks rhythm and the one who accelerates it, the sport can remain extremely high in execution while becoming poorer as spectacle.
For this reason, the objection “but Sinner is extremely strong” does not answer the problem. Of course he is extremely strong. That is exactly why his case is interesting. If even the finest interpreter of modern tennis can seem less than entertaining, then perhaps the problem is not him. Perhaps it is the game that modern tennis rewards.
Sinner should not be criticised for playing this way. That would be absurd. He plays in the way that allows him to win, and he does so with astonishing quality. But the spectator is not obliged to mistake efficiency for entertainment. One can admire Sinner and still be bored by the kind of tennis Sinner brings to perfection.
The problem, in short, is not that Sinner is not great. The problem is that greatness in today’s tennis increasingly passes through the perfect repetition of the same language. And a sport that also lived on contrasts risks becoming an exercise in increasingly uniform excellence.
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