Stefanos Tsitsipas, the hero of ‘old-fashioned’ tennis

The Hellenic is fresh off a battle won in three sets against Daniil Medvedev

He will play it all against Andrey Rublev, Stefanos Tsitsipas. Yet another clash between the two will determine who will advance to the round in the Red Group of the Nitto Atp Finals in Turin. In the hard-fought match against Daniil Medvedev, in which the Greek prevailed in the third-set tie-breaker after mockingly losing the second partial, Tsitsipas almost exasperated a tactic that he is using more and more frequently, and which earns him the palm of ‘nostalgic’ of the tennis of yesteryear: the serve and volley.

Indeed, in recent years there are very few, and almost exclusively in tournaments on the grass surface, tennis players who rely on the descent to the net immediately after the serve: a prerogative, on the other hand, that was very common many decades ago, and that saw champions of the caliber of John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg and Boris Becker, delight the audience with an undoubtedly spectacular tactic of play compared to just hitting the ball violently from the back of the court.

“The serve and volley is something I’ve wanted to add to my game in the last two or three years, even on clay,” Tsitsipas said after his triumph over Medvedev. “The goal is to give less references, to be less predictable. It’s a fundamental that has been lost over the last few years in our sport, but I think it’s important to see it in more and more players in major tournaments. And in front of big crowds. In the context of modernized tennis, the transition from serve to net introduces different variations, and keeps the aggressive elements of the game,” he concluded.