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WIMBLEDON – For seven stunning days, it has become tennis’s deadliest blow.
This is a serve from 21-year-old French player Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, and the player waiting to serve needs to hit the ball over the net.
Or, get, cajole, persuade, will, pray back.
It’s a rocket explosion that’s hard to watch, let alone put on a racket, let alone return from a 3-foot-high piece of net from 39 feet away.
As for making quality returns to control a point, or making enough returns on Mpetshi Perricard’s serve to win the game? For seven days, this seemed impossible for everyone in the draw.
Except maybe the remaining players in the draw who already know how to open the Mpetshi Perricard service lock. He is another Frenchman, a year younger than Mpetshi Perricard, who is making the breakthrough at the majors that many have been waiting for for more than a year.
That man is Arthur Fils, who has been Mpetshi Perricard’s best friend since both were 10-year-olds in the French national tennis training program Outstanding. but fils has no intention of sharing any of the secrets he has learned over the years with others in the field.
Some numbers. The 6-foot-8 (203 cm) Mpetshi Perricard had 105 aces in three matches, including 51 in a first-round win over Sebastian Korda. He is the No. 20 seed at the All England Club and one of the best grass court players in the world.
Mpetshi Perricard opens the motion (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
His first serve scoring rate is as high as 85%. He lost three sets, but only one failed to reach a tiebreaker. He’s tied with Ben Shelton for the fastest serve in the tournament at 140 mph, but even Shelton puts Mpetshi Perricard’s serve in a different league than him, in part because The Frenchman’s second serve can sometimes cross the net at 128 mph.
“Ridiculous,” is how Sheldon describes Mpetshi Perricard’s product.
“He basically hit two firsts.”
If you’re Boris Becker, the status of the big serve, flat shot or boom has declined over the past two decades. These are no longer the days of Pete Sampras and many like him, who won Grand Slam titles on a diet of not returning serve and winning tiebreaks when needed, but more often than not just on their opponents’ Won a game on serve and thought their job was done until the scoreboard told them they had to start a new set.
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‘They mentally slow down’: How tennis players return serve at 130 mph
Four men, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, are largely responsible for this decline. If you serve the ball faster than 135 mph, and when you stop moving, the first thing you see is the ball you just hit, coming to your ankle very hard and fast, looking harder and harder. Hurry up, then your day to win the tennis match is probably around the corner.
In contemporary tennis, the word that gets thrown around is “serve robot”: a term that’s at least slightly pejorative and decidedly unsympathetic, referring to players who are essentially unbreakable because they serve so well but they can’t. It’s also inherently unlikable, as his highly effective trebuchets against tennis balls are basically all they have.
Mpetshi Perricard is not that person. He can move. His volleys stung. He studied video of the biggest servers, especially John Isner, but said watching Ivo Karlovic, who was about seven feet tall, was “a little boring.”
Mpetshi Perricard’s Net play, touch and volleys are all perfect on grass (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)
During those seven days at Wimbledon, Fiers and Mpetesh Perikad lived their dreams while trying not to dream. Don’t think about the next game, or even the next one, or the game or competition each of them will be competing in.
They text each other regularly and, if schedules allow, have dinner together almost every night at the game. Mpesh Perikad received a text message from Phils shortly after he defeated Romain Safiullin to reach the second week of a Grand Slam for the first time.
Mpetshi Perricard’s coach Emmanuel Planque said no one in the world spent more time on the tennis court than Fils and Mpetshi Perricard.
Fiers said Plank was 100 percent correct, meaning he had seen and returned Mpehi Perikad’s serve before anyone else in the world.
“He taught me how to come back,” Fiers said of Mapesh Perikad after seventh-seeded Hubert Hulkac withdrew from the second round with a knee injury. Match point was saved in the fourth set.
“This is good practice.”
On the eighth day, the reality of professional tennis forced them to wake up. Fiers lost in the fourth round to Alex De Minaur, a player he beat at the Barcelona Open in April, but on clay it was the Australian’s least favorite site.
No. 9 seed De Minaur loves grass because it allows him to take full advantage of his speed and excellent movement while keeping his hard, flat shots nice and low. Although Fiers came out strong in the fourth set, winning 6-2, 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, he made the most of it.
Fiers’ impressive performance against Hulkac propelled him into the third round (Rob Newell/Camerasport via Getty Images)
Mpetshi Perricard takes on Lorenzo Musetti, the Italian starlet quietly having a solid grass court season.
Musetti reached the semifinals in Stuttgart and the final at Queen’s, his first Wimbledon appearance the following week. Although Musetti said a year ago that he was lost in the stuff, he has a better winning percentage on grass and clay than on hard courts, and he has a game that suits the surface. not just a knife backhand slice The serve is good, but the return is economical, which eliminates the need for complex forehands and one-handed backhands. He slices, cuts, deflects balls and is ready to get the most out of his tools in rallies, where they’ll actually be effective.
“I don’t know, I’m just focused on the next match,” Mpehi Perikad said when asked how far he could go after defeating Finland’s Emil Rusuvori in four sets on Saturday. .
“I already lost to Musetti, so I don’t know.”
Of course, but Mpetshi Perricard has also lost at Wimbledon. He lost his final qualifying match to another Frenchman, Maxime Janvier, in four sets, three of which went to tie-breaks. Mpetshi Perricard then ended up taking one of those “lucky loser” spots that arise when a player withdraws at the last minute. he He was in the dressing room after practice last Saturday when a tournament official called him to ask if he would like to play in the Wimbledon main draw for the first time.
Is he nervous? Not at all, he said. Great opportunity, no pressure, great experience.
Since then, Mpetshi Perricard and his serve have been an unstoppable force with no immovable target. He hit his first serve like a rock with a frying pan and watched it slice toward the corner of the tee box. The opponent simply sets his sights on the grass and then moves to the other side of the court.
Mpetshi Perricard’s serve is equally effective during the Queen’s match at Wimbledon. (James Fearn/Getty Images)
Fiers himself isn’t a bad serve, but their bodies and games are completely different.
Fiers, who grew up near Paris, was an all-court player who featured among the all-time greats. Standing just over six feet tall, he is a consummate athlete who desperately wants to be a forward for PSG and score goals, but is not good enough yet.
Fiers enters the majors for the first time in Week 2 (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
Mpetshi Perricard from Lyon is a model for the new generation of tennis players such as Alexander Zverev and Daniil Medvedev. At nearly seven feet tall, taller than six feet, they look a little out of place on a tennis court until they start serving, where their long arms and spines give them extra leverage to knock the ball down from high.
Mpetshi Perricard also played a bit of football and dabbled in basketball and swimming before concentrating on tennis, mainly because he was better at it than other sports and believed he could make the most of his strength and size while learning the sport .
Planque said Mpetshi Perricard is still developing this part of the game. His career began when he and Phil were teenagers working with Plank and other national coaches from the French Tennis Federation, as well as several other top players their age, including Arthur Cazor and Luca Van Assche. The serve has always been his greatest weapon. They are a bit like the young Italians led by Jannik Sinner who pushed each other as teenagers and in regional championships at the lower levels of the sport.
Plank knew Mpetshi Perricard would always take advantage of his serve.
“He doesn’t want to play long rallies,” he said. “Our goal is to be aggressive from the first shot.”
He also wants him to go to the net at every opportunity, even on serve and volley, a dying art that most players only use as a surprise tactic.
“I’m an old-school coach,” Plank said.
Old-fashioned style is also one of Mpetshi Perricard’s bottom lines. Like Musetti, he’s the rare young player to hit a one-handed backhand — though he now wishes he hadn’t and watches with envy Isner’s two-handed backhand in these videos. As Musetti learned, achieving return on service single-handedly is a daunting task.
Mpetshi Perricard’s booming serve, one-handed backhand and soft play at the net feel like a throwback (Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
While his first serve is the star, improving his second serve is one of his main goals this season. He crushed the first ball, and if he missed, he tried to do something different with the second ball, which averaged 117 mph. Maybe he’ll spin a little, or go down the middle, or get into the body instead of extending out like he often does on first pitch.
“For now, it’s working,” he said after beating Rusuvori last week. “We’ll see if it works against top players.”
He did see it, but he didn’t like what he saw. Musetti won the serve battle, winning 79% of her first serve points to Mpetshi Perricard’s 67 points, and 84% of her second serve points to Mpetshi Perricard’s 67. Perricard) with 53 points.
He also won the fight back. The first serve return hit rate was 32%, while Mpetshi Perricard was 20%; the second serve return hit rate was 33%, while Mpetshi Perricard was 16%.
After the game, Musetti also agreed that facing the serve is like a goalkeeper in a penalty shootout, and said that the coach has explained that to break serve, he needs to have a 0-40 buffer instead of relying on 30-40 or even 15- 40 is also an opportunity because it can be easily snatched up. Musetti must choose a moment where he feels comfortable before the discomfort returns in the next game.
It’s not just now. Mpesh Perikad’s serve looks like it will be an embarrassment to top receiving players for many years to come.
As for Fiers, he may soon be receiving texts from other players.
(Above: John Walton/PA Images via Getty Images)
