Week 10, 2024

🚨 The Draw EXCLUSIVE 🚨

Joao Fonseca was offered wildcards to play at both Indian Wells and Miami, Gill Gross can confirm. He decided to turn them down based on multiple factors:

1) a reluctance to switch quickly from clay court to hard and back to clay again, something he does not have experience doing as of yet.

2) a desire to gain some match experience in Challengers before jumping immediately to the very highest level of the tour.

The tentative plan is to play some Challengers in the coming weeks, before traveling to Europe in April and potentially making a return to ATP tournaments on clay.

Is it the 5th slam? Here’s what we found interesting this week. 

• A Thread of Order - Fonseca Breakdown

  Why It’s Interesting: Hugh Clarke is a go-to source of ours on pro technique, and he has rave reviews for Joao’s Fonseca’s groundstrokes.

• Rublev’s comments on Dubai

  Why It’s Interesting: Interviewer Sofya Tartakova has a good relationship with Rublev and a blunt interviewing style; this is the most honest conversation you’ll hear on what happened. Interview is in Russian with English subtitles.

• Brad Gilbert’s Take on Helping Coco Improve

  Why It’s Interesting: If you’re like most people, you’re going to disagree with a lot of what Brad says here. But from the very start he has insisted on taking the focus away from her forehand and you simply cannot argue with the results so far.

• Can Sebastian Baez win off clay?

  Why It’s Interesting: This is the essential question for Baez at this point. Even Baez’s serve numbers go down when he steps off the dirt. Jeff Sackman breaks down the data.

• Intuitive Tennis broke down Swiatek’s serve changes

  Why It’s Interesting: We think the analysis here is on point, or it wouldn’t be here. What exactly Swiatek was looking to get out of the adjustments is murky and unclear. What remains the case is Iga being the best baseliner in the world by far, meaning she’s gonna keep winning matches without an elite serve.

• An Expert’s Take on Rafa’s Injury

  Why It’s Interesting: We’ll be honest; this one won’t be for everyone. But if you want to delve into the science of an iliopsoas tear, the injury Rafa suffered at the Australian Open last year, you will find no equal on the internet.

• Eva Lys Goes Public with Her Battle

This week’s Monday Match Analysis covers Alcaraz’s stunning performance against FAA & Sinner’s routine win against Jan-Lennard Struff.

🎙️ Gill is calling the Arizona Tennis Classic 175 Challenger this week. It will be on ATP Challenger TV and Tennis Channel Plus all week, as well as T2 Friday-Sunday.

Hey everyone, Gill Gross here. While I’m grateful for any amount of success I’ve had talking tennis on the internet for the past half decade, I believe we should all be doing better in this sport as creators and as fans. The tennis content economy is far behind other sports by metrics of engagement and popularity. This newsletter is our effort to DRAW the great things we find in tennis every week- we search for content that teaches us, makes us think, makes us laugh and ultimately makes loving this sport the best possible experience. Our vision is to speed up the growth of a robust content economy in tennis, for the benefit of fans, players and creators alike.

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