To Medvedev’s credit, he changed things up in the 2nd and began to play tighter to the baseline and drive shots more aggressively at Sinner to try to extract errors. That being said, I think he missed a lot of opportunities to capitalize on the slower, middle-of-box second serves Sinner was tossing him from the late 2nd to early 3rd set. If your goal is to try to pressure Sinner’s groundstrokes, why not apply immediate pressure off a serve you know is going to be soft? I know Medvedev’s groundstrokes tend to be long and require some windup, but he’s got great biomechanics; I don’t see a mechanical reason that bars him from truncating swings and pouncing on 2nd serves.

He effectively used that tactic in Rotterdam final. In general I don’t think there is any mechanical reason for returning so far, he simply is extremely confident from the baseline and thinks that, especially against “high-risk” attacking opponents like Sinner, he can have higher chances to win the point this way. This also was effective against Sinner for long time, now Jannik became incredibly consistent and with more stamina, trying to exchange from the baseline now against him is exhausting. So yeah, I agree with you, and Meddie too probably now. Sinner has a decent but still exploitable second serve, and an opponent need to be assertive when returning because they will not have so many chances to outpower him.