The ATP Finals in Turin, Italy, features the best men’s tennis players in the world, who have some of the strongest backhands on the tour. And yet, these players are often succeeding by running around those backhands and getting into position to turn them into the more powerful forehand.
Most points end in four shots or less, but when rallies reach that fifth shot, players need to seize an advantage. “Hunting for forehands is not about trying to end the point, but about controlling it and getting on offense as quickly as you can,” said the ESPN analyst Patrick McEnroe.
Being the first player to turn a backhand into a forehand, called an inside-out forehand when it’s hit to your opponent’s backhand, is that edge, putting them on the defensive and opening up the opposite corner.
“The forehand is the bigger weapon, and it’s easier to maneuver your opponent because you can create better angles,” added Michael Russell, who coaches Taylor Fritz, one of the eight entrants in Turin.
Craig O’Shannessy pushed Novak Djokovic, who has one of the best backhands, to hit more forehands when he coached him during 2017-19.
O’Shannessy, who focuses on statistics and patterns, has studies showing that forehands are, on average, about eight miles an hour faster than backhands and that between two-thirds and three-quarters of all winners are typically hit on forehands.
“That’s a vital piece of information, which says, ‘even if your backhand is great, it’s nothing as an offensive weapon compared to the forehand,’” he said. “I’ve always called the forehand the sword and the backhand the shield.”
Runaround forehands are typically hit open-stanced, which allows players to disguise their direction, he added. “You’re upgrading your shot and freezing your opponent.”
O’Shannessy’s studies break the court into four quadrants: A is the extreme forehand side; B is the forehand side near the middle; C is the backhand side near the middle; and D is the backhand sideline.
He said more balls land in the C quadrant than any other, so players should transform those from backhands to forehands, saying the majority of forehand winners are actually hit from the backhand side, while players make fewer errors off their forehand from that position.
The strategy is not new, of course. Ivan Lendl popularized the inside-out forehand in the 1980s and players, including Jim Courier, succeeded with it in the next generation. But the growth in this tactic over the past two decades stems, not surprisingly, from Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.
“Rafa was the king of runaround forehands, but he was a lefty, and for righties looking at it and conceptualizing it, Roger was their man,” O’Shannessy said.
He noted that Federer would hit as many as two-thirds of all his shots as forehands, and more than half were often from the backhand side. The average player hits about 53 percent forehands.
“When I worked with Novak we absolutely copied Roger,” he added. “Hitting 53 percent of your shots as forehands is a joke. Everyone should just be copying Roger.”
(The strategy differs for lefties, whose inside-out forehand goes to a righty’s forehand, but Nadal proved its value, though O’Shannessy said lefties should first hit “inside-in” forehands to the righty’s backhand to move them over.)
McEnroe said the pace of the shots and the player’s speed make running around backhands more important, allowing the attacker to open the court more with different angles, including shorter balls that pull their opponents far off the court.
“Also, if you hit a relatively good forehand into your opponent’s backhand corner, their shot may land more in the middle so you can now hit a forehand crosscourt into the open area,” he said.
Still, McEnroe and Russell place some caveats on this tactic. McEnroe said stepping around backhands to hit that inside-out forehand is “trying to bait your opponent into hitting a backhand down the line.”
At the ATP Finals, he’d be “wary” of overdoing that approach against an opponent like Alexander Zverev, who can hit great backhands down the line and leave the opponent out of position and vulnerable; while trying to open up the opposite forehand corner is less effective against a player with the speed of Carlos Alcaraz.
Additionally, he said, sometimes players can go too far over to hit a forehand, moving all the way into the doubles alley or even off the court to hunt down a forehand opportunity. “At the highest levels that’s very risky,” he said.
Russell said that’s particularly true for a player like Fritz, who was confident in his own backhand on a fast, low-bouncing court like Turin.
“If Taylor runs around his backhand there, is he exposing too much of himself,” he said. “You have to be calculated in your movement and your spacing. If you don’t make the shot good enough, you will put yourself on the defensive, even though your goal was to be on the offensive. It will depend on your opponent’s positioning. If he’s in the middle of the court, you’re not going to be able to create as much of an angle.”
But O’Shannessy doesn’t buy into the caveats about court speed or the quality of the opponents. For starters, he said, the players who step around backhands are putting their opponent on the run, which is always crucial, but especially now at year’s end when energy is running low.
“You’re hitting more winners, but also your opponent generally is more likely to hit that ball back crosscourt to you so you don’t have to get to the middle and do less running, which puts less wear and tear on your body,” he said.
As for the debate about leaving that A quadrant open to backhands down the line, he said these players could usually cover the court well enough to get there and would then be in position to hit a massive crosscourt forehand to their opponent who was out of position in their own “D quadrant” on the backhand side.
So the elite level of players at the ATP Finals would not discourage O’Shannessy from hunting forehands.
“I would be coaching every player there to double down on running around backhands,” he said.
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