Weekend

On this weekend of June 2018, some stray hatke thoughts:

After IPL was over, the next sports action for sports lovers is Tennis  season , which has just started with French Open in Paris  and whose finals are slated for this weekend on Saturday (Ladies) and Sunday (Gents). When you talk of Tennis , there are two name which always come into mind are that of Roger Federer and Rafeal Nadal of the current era, the two modern day super stars of the Tennis world. There is considerable amount of rivalry between two of them, and in all the matches (which comes under aegis of ATP), between two of them it is Nadal who leads by 23  to 15 matches over Federer. But  if you consider who has won more Grand Slam Championship then Federar has a lead over Nadal, as till date Federer have won 20 Grand Slam Championship as compared to 16  by Nadal. If you go into details Federar has won 5 Australian Open, 1 French Open, 8 Wimbeldon and 5 US Open, whereas Nadal has won 1 Australian Open, 10 French Open, 2 Wimbeldon and 3 US Open. From this you will notice Nadal has won his max Grand Slam at French Open (#10) played at clay surface and at other slams his performances are not that Grand , 1 at Australian, 2 at Wimbeldon and 3 at US Open. His performance at Australian open (#1) is not that superlative, where as Federer performance at French Open is not that grand where he has won only once.  Federar is at his best at grass courts at Wimbeldon , where he has won 8 times but his performances at other 2 grand slams are also note worthy,  he has won Australian Open and US Open 6 and 5 times respectively. So if you go by grand slam performances Federer is ahead of Nadal by 20 to 16, and in head to head matches it is Nadal who is leading. So it is difficult to decide who is better player among them, some sports analyst always say that Federer is better player considering his all round performances at all the different playing surfaces and Nadal is more comfortable playing on clay surface, that is the reason he has won more French Open titles . In Federer case  he is more comfortable at playing grass surface ( at Wimbeldon) but he is equally proficient on playing on artificial surface and hard surface (Australian and US Open).

Presently French Open is in progress and  at the time of writing this blog, Nadal has already reached semi finals and  he will be playing this match today for  place in the final, and as per odds he is hot favourite to win the the championship this time also. For last few years Federer has realised that clay surface  is not suitable for his type of play, so he has stopped playing at French open and similarly Nadal also skips playing at Wimbeldon now a days. Wimbeldon will also starts  after three weeks and there it will be Roger Federer who will be hot favourite to win the championship. It is always said that if both of these players were playing in different era when they do not have to compete with each other, they would have definitely won more Grand Slam Championship than their present count.

There have been always 2 or 3 great players in every era , like Bjorn Borg, Jimmy Connors, John Mcnroe in late 70s & early 80s,  Ivan Lendl,  Stefan Edberg and Borris Becker in late 80s/early 90s, then Pete Sampras, Andre Aggasi & Jim Courier in late 90s and early 2000s. But in the case of these players rivalry was not that intense and they have not won that number of  Gran Slams what Nadal and Federer have won. Closest to them are Pete Sampras(#14), Bjorn Borg (#12) & and Novak Dejovoic (#12) who is also playing presently with  Nadal and Federer.

So in the end it will be very difficult to predict who  is the greatest tennis player of all time, but my vote vote will always go to Roger Federer.

What you say my friends.

Waiting for your feed backs/views/comments.