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Nole Djokovic

Tennis techniques can be as complex as golf swings, only on the tennis court the working strokes are flung out centrifugally from within a rolling ball of perpetual motion (translate that, google!), and the swings are most often delivered at the end of a baseline sprint or a dash to the net. This takes the skill level way up above anything you'll see ground out by a humourless tiger on a golf course.

And it is the ability to deliver a perfect stroke at the end of each exertion that is setting Nole above the rest of the pack in the 2011 tennis season.
Technically speaking, there are no stand-alone elements in Nole's game which, if you saw them played out in featureless silhouette form, you'd immediately recognise as belonging to Djokovic (like, for example, the unmistakable McEnroe serve and backhand, or the Seles, Graf, Sampras and Nadal forehands)... but I would recognise Nole's microphone haircut, which always makes me want to grab him by the neck and break into a sing-song: 'Ain't no stoppin' us now....we got the groove!'

Like most great players, what presently sets Novak Djokovic apart is a duality of technique and delivery. The power and exactitude of his stroke play, wedded to the well-practised ease of his court coverage, allows him to deliver Swiss watch-like precision under the kind of duress that would fold the strokes of lesser movers. Actually, the tired metaphor of watch-like precision doesn't do justice to game of tennis and the skill of it's practitioners, because the watch is a static example of precise moving parts, whereas tennis is a feat of technical engineering... with the addition of emotion and legs!

Quite a lot has been made of Nole's ability to return serve and the reasons for his superb service return is twofold:
Firstly, Novak plays so well off balance and on the lunge, that when he is thrusting over to either side he isn't really off balance at all. Connors was similarly a master at this lunging / balancing act, but Jimmy had the simplest of strokes and no looped backswing to complicate things.
Secondly, Nole is a master cloth-cutter and he trims his ground strokes to suit the occasion and at very short notice, and against harder servers he shaves his strokes to perfection. In fact Djokovic is equally at ease hitting at full tilt in groundstroke rallies or playing with little or no backswing on the return of serve.
I call this the short time game (when you're short of time to crank up a full stroke) and for me the return of serve is a far more instinctive, volley-like stroke than a full baseline tilt.
If you compare Nole's return of serve to that of, say, Andy Roddick, you'll see that Nole is more naturally inclined to trim-and-deliver his regular strokes. Although Andy Roddick has trimmed the loop off his original forehand (see Chapter 9 of the book), for me Andy has never had a returner's instinctive lunge-and-trim, which attained a kind of perfection in Andre Agassi's return of serve.

Run the buttons to reveal an animation of Nole's return of serve in the main image frame, which is a good example of a trim-to-fit return of serve on the forehand side.
In frames 1 and 2 you can see that Nole sinks into a knee bend at the precise moment that the ball leaves the server's racket strings, and the turn to the forehand side is aided and abetted by a simple push of the left leg.
Turn your attention to the racket arm in 4 through 6 and you'll see that Nole's elbow never strays far from his ribs.
Why?
Because by keeping the elbow low and tight to his body, Djokovic trims the size of the (first part of the) loop, thus shaving milliseconds off the time needed to produce a fully functional return of serve.
Are you twitter heads still following this?
Are you sweating profusely because you've had to read more than 140 characters?
Good. Because if you lose the ability to concentrate for long periods, you'll never be much of a tennis player.

The next stage of the trim-to-fit groundstroke is to flatten the size of the loop as it circles the elbow.
Run 4, 5 and 6 again and you'll see a great example of how to cut a service return down to size without completely ridding the stroke of it's natural loop. Novak sort of swift-swishes the back-swinging racket head into a forward swing with the shallowest of loops. But making the loop small, rather than ridding the stroke of it completely (like Jimmy Connors does) Novak Djokovic retains the stroke's continuity and trims it to fit the available time slot.

Djokovic's play throughout the first part of 2011 has been breathtakingly good and Nole's relative success on the clay courts must be worrying for his contemporaries, particularly Federer and Nadal, because Novak's super-efficient stroke play and the ability to trim his returns to perfection are skills much better suited to grass.
Of course I thought that about Safin and was wrong. But whereas Marat didn't believe, Nole now does. Fervently.