Swiss master Roger Federer is a hard man to stop. Photo / AP
Swiss master Roger Federer is a hard man to stop. Photo / AP
A glance at the list of the "famous five" to have beaten Federer in the past 12 months does not bring up too many clues.
The five winners were: Russian journeyman Evgeny Donskoy, veteran Tommy Haas, rising star Alexander Zverev, former US Open champion Juan Martin del Potro and diminutive Belgian David Goffin.
The Donskoy and Haas defeats were freaky matches in which Federer wasted match points. Against Zverev, Federer was carrying a back injury, while he was blasted off court by del Potro and then flummoxed by Goffin's unerring consistency in London in November.
There's not much of a pattern. Del Potro and Zverev are big-hitters, but Donskoy and Goffin are more about finding effective line and length from the baseline, while the 39-year-old Haas is an aggressive baseliner and won a very tight match against an undercooked Federer 6-4 in the third set on a slick grass court.
After a dispiriting straight-sets loss against Federer this week, Tomas Berdych was asked how you go about beating the 19-time grand slam champion. He deadpanned in response that "I would like to know".
All those caveats aside, Federer is of course (just about) beatable. Here's how to do it.
1. Get to the net
This is a high-risk, high-reward strategy that is the tennis equivalent of putting all your money on a spin of the roulette wheel. If you're luck's in, you're a hero. If it isn't, you're left looking pretty foolish.
In the former group, we have Sergiy Stakhovsky's remarkable four-set victory over Federer at Wimbledon five years ago.
No one gave the unheralded Stakhovsky a chance of causing a surprise against the defending champion, but he bravely took Federer out of his comfort zone by charging to the net and asking his opponent to come up with winning passing shots again and again.
Sergiy Stakhovsky. Photo / Getty Images
"He was uncomfortable to play against," a shell-shocked Federer said afterwards. "He served and volleyed really well. It was difficult to get into that much rhythm against a player like that."
Weighing up how much to attack Federer is a similar dilemma to the one faced by opponents of English football Premier League leaders Manchester City. Do you attempt damage limitation like Newcastle, or try to be more proactive like Liverpool?
The answer, in both tennis and football, strongly depends on the quality available. Unfortunately for tonight's opponent in the Australian Open men's singles final, Marin Cilic, he is not the most natural volleyer, but he must at least make sporadic trips to the net to try to upset Federer's rhythm.
2. Own the baseline
Few players can outhit Federer from the back of the court, especially now that his remodelled backhand has removed the one obvious weakness from his game. But it can be done.
Of the five players who beat Federer last year, this was best demonstrated by del Potro in the US Open quarter-final. Del Potro ultimately blew his opponent off the court with a barrage of phenomenally powerful forehands. One in the first set reached 170km/h and sent Federer sprawling to the ground. The sheer velocity seemed to genuinely startle Federer, who then double faulted on the next point.
As del Potro said afterwards: "I played everything well. My serve was good, I hit my forehands as hard as I possibly could."
Juan Martin del Potro. Photo / Getty Images
Cilic may not have quite the same power as del Potro, but he's not far off and has clocked the fastest backhand of this year's Australian Open, while hitting an average of 21 forehand winners a match along the way.
For him to stand any chance against Federer tonight, Cilic would have to go for broke like del Potro did and pray enough howitzers land in. Berdych played with similar aggression on Wednesday for most of the first set, but backed off once he'd seen a 5-2 lead disappear.
To beat Federer, a player can't get downhearted if an aggressive strategy is not paying instant dividends. They need to persist with it and keep forcing Federer to come up with his best tennis.
Federer has exuded an aura for much of his career, something that the now retired former Wimbledon finalist David Nalbandian noticed more than a decade ago.
Nalbandian, who beat Federer eight times in his career, said that most players' attitude before facing the Swiss was: "Aw s***, I'm playing Roger, I'm out."
Nalbandian put his relative success against Federer down to the fact that: "Every time I get on the court, I believe I can beat him. Not enough guys think that way."
If anything, Federer's aura is stronger than ever now, and Nalbandian's assessment remains pertinent. Federer has not been at his best at the Australian Open, but none of his opponents have even remotely tested him or looked like they truly believed they could cause an upset.
Berdych had his chances against Federer in their quarter-final, but appeared resigned to defeat from the moment he lost a first set he should have won.
Cilic will have a lot of scar tissue from the eight defeats he's suffered against Federer, but he must at least go into the final believing he can win. As Mats Wilander dryly noted while commentating for Eurosport earlier this week: "Federer is just a 36-year-old guy. That's what you have to tell yourself."
Even Federer can't do a huge amount against an opponent who is serving out of their minds. Cilic himself served unbelievably well when beating Federer in their 2014 US Open semifinal, including banging down three aces in a row when serving for the match.
Federer lamented afterwards: "He served great; it was one of those matches like old-school tennis. It was just like full swing from all sides: forehand, backhand, serve, return."
Cilic has also been in excellent serving form for the past fortnight, winning 90 per cent of first serve points against Kyle Edmund on Thursday and winning 92 per cent of his service games in the tournament.
A few other players have beaten Federer playing like this in recent years, but perhaps the most devastating example was Jo-Wilfried Tsonga's serving masterclass at Wimbledon seven years ago.
Tsonga lost the first two sets but then raced to a five-set victory without facing a break point in the final three sets.
An exasperated Federer said afterwards: "He [Tsonga] just continued serving great, which for me was important [because I needed] to get at least a couple of chances. But the chances were slim. He only needed a couple of breaks to end up bringing it home. So he did a really good job doing that."
This tactic will probably yield a few double faults along the way - as it did with Nick Kyrgios in Miami last year - but it can also succeed in keeping Federer on the back foot.
5. Don't give him rhythm
When Federer gets into a groove and starts enjoying himself, his opponents might as well start packing for their flight home. A confident, rhythmic Federer is more or less unbeatable, so you have to try to keep him off balance.
Novak Djokovic has traditionally been the master of this, with the Serb's awkward returns and incredible powers of retrieval taking him to six wins from eight matches against Federer in 2015 and 2016.
Of course, few other players - if any - are blessed with the defensive skills of a peak-era Djokovic, but there are other ways of moving Federer out of his comfort zone.
David Goffin. Photo / AP
Goffin confounded Federer with his heavily spun groundstrokes last year, while going further back, Julien Benneteau's awkward returns and beguiling mixture of slices and spins took him to a two-set lead over Federer at Wimbledon in 2012.
Alternatively, and this is a pretty much untried method, it would be amusing to see someone go down the gamesmanship route of trying to deliberately unsettle Federer by, say, making him slow down his famously lightning-quick service games.
Robin Soderling and then Lukas Rosol famously ruffled Rafael Nadal's feathers by getting in the way of his myriad routines; why shouldn't someone try something similar with Federer? Especially as Federer admitted to being "antsy" and highly-strung during the first set of his win against Berdych on Wednesday.
In a sport as genteel as tennis, and with a community as deferential as the ATP tour is to Federer, this is extremely unlikely to ever happen, but it would be entertaining if it did.
And if all of the above fails, perhaps try legendary coach Nick Bollettieri's suggestion. "Take him to a restaurant," he once said, "and put a little hot tamale in his food."
