Making your opponent bend to your own intentions is a critical layer of any tennis match.
When you are a lefty, like Donald Young, you tend to bend far less because you are so accustomed to playing right-handed players. Righties typically have to change things up against lefties, which is exactly where Young’s problems will begin against Novak Djokovic on Margaret Court Arena late Tuesday afternoon.
Quite simply, Young will naturally want to hit his lefty forehand cross court. It’s what lefties do against righties. But on the other side of the net is one of the greatest backhands of all time. Young’s forehand is not the biggest, so power is not a weapon he can rely on - but direction is.
MORE: All the latest scores and results
Young is 0-2 head-to-head against Djokovic, and his reliance on forehands is huge. When Young has won the point at the Australian Open in three recent matches, 60 per cent of his winning shots have been a forehand.
Young will be sailing directly into the wind trying to pound Djokovic’s backhand into submission. He needs to spread the court, run the Serb hard to the forehand side, and use every inch of the baseline to launch a side-to-side attack. In other words, he will be the one that needs to change his typical game plan in this match.
This will be the first match back for Djokovic in six months. Everything will be a little on the unknown side of the equation, especially with his serve. To prevent further elbow pain, the Serb has abbreviated his serve motion to avoid any extra pressure on the elbow. It will be interesting to see how it performs.
When Djokovic won here last at Melbourne Park in 2016, he won 54 per cent (490/907) of his baseline points, including cracking 100 forehand winners, and 55 backhand winners. He put 77 per cent of all returns back in play, and won an impressive 61 per cent returning opponent’s second serves.
Those boxes all got ticked, and then some.
Young actually has a losing record on second serve points for his career, at 49 per cent, and was just above that in 2017, at 50 per cent. As soon as Young misses a first serve in this match, the pressure meter is going to ramp up quickly for the 28 year-old American.
His second serve will naturally curve into Djokovic’s backhand return location, which has trouble written all over it. Djokovic has one of the premier backhand returns in history, and there is little chance he has forgotten how to use it during his six-month lay off.
Young will need to serve more to Djokovic’s forehand, especially jamming at the body-forehand location, to step Djokovic stepping in and having his way with backhand returns.
Young’s chances of winning the match are not high. Ironically, the more he sticks with his typical patterns of play, the more that win percentage drops. He needs to bend what he likes to typically do if he is going to bend the winning needle his way.
PREDICTION: Djokovic in 4 sets.