ABU DHABI // Who are the greatest returners in tennis? Casual and hardcore followers can probably agree on the best part of one list.
Andre Agassi will be there of course, probably near the very top. Novak Djokovic’s mind-bending elasticity puts him into that conversation for sure.
Rafael Nadal has to be in there, as does Leyton Hewitt, who in so many ways, was a harbinger of the modern game.
Andy Murray sure, Roger Federer of course, purely because, at his peak, he did everything close to perfection.
Well, according to the ATP’s statistics for the percentage of points won on an opponent’s first serve, David Ferrer sits at the top of the pile for current players and second-best of all time (since they started collating these records).
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In fact, he is second on the list for total number of points won on an opponent’s first serve: till the end of 2015, he had won 14,750, some distance behind Federer’s 20,326.
It is so in keeping with the career of Ferrer that though he inevitably gets talked about in such discussions, few will be aware exactly how high up he sits in this list. Second-best returner of a first serve ever? Phew.
It was that level of excellence that helped him not only neutralise Jo-Wilfried Tsonga’s serves at the Mubadala World Tennis Championships (MWTC) on Thursday, but, in fact, to obliterate them.
Tsonga had a bad day in the capital admittedly, and he has had a few: this was his fifth loss in six matches at the MWTC over the years. But look at what he was facing.
In the fifth game of the first set, by when he was already a break down, Tsonga hit three aces. He was finding some rhythm, a few easy points are always good for confidence and perhaps he sniffed a way back into the match.
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No chance. Ferrer kept returning and eventually ground out a second break that all but settled the match. In 54 minutes and looking back now, it felt shorter than that.
“Yes he’s pretty good, very consistent,” Tsonga said later, in understatement. But in expanding on why, he shed light on something that — again, to no surprise — gets overshadowed.
Djokovic’s reach and stretchability is widely lauded. But, at 5ft 9”, and the shortest player in the top 55, Ferrer’s is nothing short of phenomenal.
“He always puts the ball in the court and then its tough to play him out of court because he runs so fast,” Tsonga said. “He’s got agility on the stretch, like we saw today, even when the ball is far, he is able to play a good shot. That’s what makes him win tournaments and be so consistently in the top 10 over the last few years.”
That, and the fact that Ferrer does not have an off-switch. Even in an exhibition tournament, a pre-season warm-up, he plays as if in the final of a grand slam.
He was on from the very first point on Thursday, because he is never off. Tsonga, by contrast, looked every inch what he was: a man playing an exhibition game with a tight forearm.
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