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In yesterday’s Australian Open quarter-final match against Hubert Hurkacz, Daniil Medvedev came through with his second five-set win of the tournament. In the decider, Hurkacz’s level dropped, Medvedev kept his ground game tight, and the Russian converted the one break point on offer. Four hours of tennis, compressed into a few crucial moments, and Medvedev has a place in the semi-finals.
Not long ago, Medvedev gained a reputation as a disappointment in deciding sets. He lost 11 of 15 three- and five-setters in 2022, and yesterday’s match was the first time in nine tries–going back to Melbourne two years ago–that he had beaten a top-ten player in a climactic set.
But such trends are easy to exaggerate. For one, three of those eight consecutive losses were clustered at the 2022 Tour Finals, where the Russian managed, remarkably, to drop third-set tiebreaks in all of his round-robin matches. Not the best way to ensure a restful offseason, but hardly an indictment of his ability to hang around late into matches with the best players in the game.
Further, except for the 2022 season, Medvedev has developed a knack for cleaning up close matches with everybody else:
Year Decider W-L Decider W% 2024 2-0 100.0% 2023 14-6 70.0% 2022 4-11 26.7% 2021 14-5 73.7% 2020 9-4 69.2% 2019 10-11 47.6% 2018 16-9 64.0% 2017 13-6 68.4% 2016 23-9 71.9% ---- Total 105-61 63.3%
2016 shouldn’t really count, since it’s a mix of ITFs, Challengers, and early forays onto the main tour, but given the results, I figured it was worth including. Wherever you draw the line, it’s hardly the case that Medvedev struggles in such matches. Recently, I looked into what a player’s third-set record “should” be, given their skill level, and a mark above 60% is better than expected for nearly anyone.
You might argue that the Russian shouldn’t have racked up so many deciders. He was expected to finish off Emil Ruusuvuori much more quickly than he did in the second round in Australia, and even on clay, he should never have gotten dragged to a fifth set at Roland Garros by Thiago Seyboth Wild, much less lost it. But everyone takes the scenic route sometimes. 14 of Medvedev’s deciding sets last year came against the top 50, 10 of them against the top 20.
The final set shift
When a match is reduced to a one-set shootout, it becomes a bit less serve-centric. This is a persistent finding in all high-pressure situations, from tiebreaks to break points to fifth sets. Servers get a bit more cautious, returners heighten their focus, and quick points are harder to come by.
The effects are small but real. In the 1,200-plus men’s deciding sets since 2017 logged by the Match Charting Project, servers win 1.1% fewer points in the final set that they did in the first two or four. They land fractionally more of their first serves, but only by increasing their margins: The percent of unreturned serves falls by more than 5%. The average rally increases from 4.1 strokes to 4.3.
There are two fundamental ways to benefit from those changes. First, you can buck the trend, continuing to serve big while your opponent succumbs to the natural tendency toward caution. That’s part of the reason that John Isner and Roger Federer were two of the very few players to win more tiebreaks than expected over long periods of time. It’s not easy, especially if fatigue is setting in. But if you can keep serving the way you did for two or four sets, you have a minor edge in the decider.
Second, you can be the type of player who excels in deciding-set-style tennis. If you had to pick between Medvedev and Hurkacz in a contest where more serves would come back and points would last longer, the choice is simple, right? It’s no guarantee, to be sure: The shift is a minor one, and it may not show up in any given match. Yesterday, more points were decided in four shots or less in the fifth set than in the first four. But on average, the trend moves in the other direction, right into the Russian’s wheelhouse.
Evidence shows that Medvedev follows these prescriptions, maintaining his attack on serve while taking advantage of more cautious opponents. Other top players, to varying degrees, do the same.
Let’s start with the basics. For each stat, I calculated every player’s performance in deciding sets, and in all previous sets. The numbers I’m about to show you are the ratio between those numbers, a measure of how much their tactics change when the final set begins. Positive numbers mean they do more of it in the decider, negative means they do less. We’ll look at the four Australian Open semi-finalists, plus Carlos Alcaraz (because of course) and Hurkacz (because of his deciding-set notoriety). Keep in mind that Novak Djokovic’s figures are limited to matches since 2017.
Here are the rate of serve points won, and the rate of first serves in:
Player SPW% 1stIn% Carlos Alcaraz 3.9% 4.4% Jannik Sinner 2.6% -1.2% Novak Djokovic 1.5% -1.1% Hubert Hurkacz 0.8% -1.9% -- Average -- -1.1% 0.7% Daniil Medvedev -1.2% -1.7% Alexander Zverev -4.5% 3.2%
Medvedev is in line with tour average when it comes to winning service points: He doesn’t hold on to as many in deciding sets. Average isn’t bad in this case, though it looks mediocre in this company. A more encouraging sign, at least in terms of the tactical approach, is the change in first serves in. The Russian, in line with Djokovic, Hurkacz, and Jannik Sinner, seems to take a few more chances in the shootout. Alcaraz defies gravity, serving more conservatively yet winning more points, and Zverev looks out of place, a caricature of prudence.
Now let’s look at the percentage of serves that don’t come back (Unret%), as well as the percent of service points won in three shots or less (SPW% <=3):
Player Unret% SPW% <=3 Novak Djokovic 10.9% 5.4% Carlos Alcaraz 0.2% 1.0% Daniil Medvedev -0.6% -2.0% Hubert Hurkacz -1.1% 0.2% -- Average -- -5.7% -3.6% Jannik Sinner -7.4% 0.3% Alexander Zverev -13.4% -11.2%
The first rule of writing about men's tennis: Whatever the topic, you'll eventually end up showering praise on Djokovic. In recent years, he has learned how to get more out of his serve, and he turns that knob even further in deciding sets. Most players struggle to simply stay above water in the final set; Djokovic starts serving bigger.
Medvedev's rate of unreturned serves is the sort of positive sign it takes a connoisseur to appreciate: "-0.6%" doesn't turn up on many Hall of Fame plaques. But when the typical player serves so much more carefully, the Russian's consistency works to his advantage. His three-shots-or-less win rate does not stand out as much, but it is still less of a step backward than the typical tour player takes.
Once again, deciding-set Alexander Zverev is an unusual beast.
Opportunistic returning
If the challenge on serve is to keep attacking in the final set, the task on return is to take advantage of an opponent who probably isn't doing that. Ideally, that might mean more aggression on the return, but a 1% or 5% weaker first serve is still only so playable. Instead, players should make sure not to squander the chances they're given: Make more returns, then tighten up the ground game for the inevitable rallies.
Here are three stats to illustrate deciding-set return tendencies, again expressed as ratios between how each player performs in the final set, compared to previous sets:
Player Ret InPlay% UFE/Pt FH% Alexander Zverev 6.7% 1.1% 1.0% Daniil Medvedev 3.9% -3.2% -1.2% Novak Djokovic 3.0% -10.5% 1.5% Hubert Hurkacz 2.9% -1.7% 0.3% Carlos Alcaraz 2.7% -10.4% -1.9% -- Average -- 2.5% -2.4% -0.3% Jannik Sinner -1.2% 0.1% 0.4%
Zverev, as we might have guessed, gets a lot of deciding-set returns in play. He's exceedingly conservative by every other measure we've seen, so why not here? Behind him, heading the non-pusher category, is Medvedev, who gets nearly 4% more returns in play in the final set that he did up to that point.
Unlike Zverev, the Russian also stays in control throughout the rally. He doesn't suddenly discover the otherworldly control of Djokovic and Alcaraz, who somehow reduce their unforced error rates by 10% in the deciding set, but he leads the rest of the pack, cutting down his mistakes by more than the tour average.
The third metric shown here--forehands as a percentage of all groundstrokes--is simply a curiosity. There's no right or wrong way to choose strokes, at least not at the level of the whole tour. As we saw last week, Medvedev and Zverev go for backhands on the plus-one shot more than anyone else, because they are in the unusual position that it might really be their stronger option. If a player improves his ground game in the fifth set--and this is nothing more than a hypothesis--it might show up in the numbers as more shots from his preferred wing. None of these men show a dramatic shift in shot selection, but I can't help but notice that Medvedev hits a few more backhands in the final set than he did in the two of four sets it took to get there.
If Medvedev reaches a fifth set in tomorrow's semi-final against Zverev, he won't need this level of savvy to know what's going on. The German's tactics, whether by design or instinct, are abundantly clear. Zverev can turn a shootout into a war of attrition, with two fifth-set tiebreaks already in Melbourne and an astonishing record of 22 deciding sets won in his last 26 attempts. While it will doubtless be a grind, the Russian might just be able to use his opponent's passivity against him. Faced with the tiny margins of a grand slam fifth set, every edge is worth exploiting.
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