Tag: Forehand

The Top 3 Ways For Federer to Beat Nadal

It’s not enough for Federer that Rafa Nadal is a great tennis player.

It’s also a challenge because Nadal plays left handed.

The problem is that most people Federer (and you) play are right handed, so he and you become used to certain patterns of play and positions on the tennis court.

When the lefty comes along, everything you know about the game seems to go out the window and if you are not careful your strong shots are dealt with easier and your weaknesses are more exposed.

Here are the top 3 adjustments you need to make to your tennis game when coming up against a left handed opponent.

Adjust Your Position On The Return Of Serve Position

Because the natural path of the ball from a lefty’s tennis serve like Nadal is to your left, you need to adjust your returning position.

By moving over to the left to return serve (on both sides) you will be in a better position to return their best serves as well as forcing them to try to hit what for them is the slightly harder serve.

In the deuce court the harder serve for them will be the kick serve out wide and the sliced serve down the centre from the ad side.

The most overlooked aspect in all of this is the fact that you will be showing them that you are aware of what’s happening on the court and you will force them to do some thinking of their own and not just serve their favourite serves and play on autopilot.

Believe me, with most players that will lead to an increase in double faults and free points for you!

Work On Your Backhand Up The Line

Because Federer and us rightys tend to want to play our backhands cross court, this can cause a problem when we play leftys as we tend to hit into their strength – the forehand.

Also, leftys are happy to get the ball on the forehand and hit it crosscourt into our backhands.

By working on the backhand up the line you can switch play so that they hit their backhand cross court into your strength (your forehand).

You may even get the chance if they try to go back up the line on your backhand to run around the ball and hit an inside out forehand.

One word of caution here, you will find many left handers (esp. Nadal) are quite good at creating wide angles from their forehands to your backhand.

If that happens, don’t try and go down the line as you will be way out of position for the next ball – you must try to go deep and cross court!!

Don’t forget When They Come To The Net

One other thing that you also need to do is to adjust what you do when a lefty comes to the net.

Because you often don’t have a lot of time when this happens it’s easy to play on auto pilot.

The problems arise when you try to put up a lob.

You should know that a lob over the backhand side of your opponent is the most effective.

Well, when you put up your normal lob for your right handed opponent this ends up going to the leftys forehand and gets crushed!!

Not only do they win the point but it pumps them up and gives them extra confidence – NOT GOOD!!

You can just see Nadal pumping his fist after dispatching an easy overhead.

Conclusion

These adjustments may not help Federer to beat Nadal as I’m sure he is aware of them, but they will most certainly help most of the club players out there when they come up against lefty opponents.

Start using them today!

Also try to search out some left handed people to practise with.

This will prove invaluable when you have to play one in a match.