The mistake we make about unforced errors

The reason is simple. The tournament official mechanically adds on to the figure of unforced errors for every shot that a player hits out of court or into the net as long as he has got his racquet onto the ball. He just does not take into account that the error may have occurred after the player was made to move around the court by the opponent from one corner to the other or tricked into misreading the length, speed or trajectory of the shot, finally forcing him to mis-hit the ball at some stage. This goes down in my coach8217;s book as a forced error.

There was one match where the official site said I had 85 unforced errors and my coach had that figure at 43 in his notes which incidentally, is still way too high!

One must also understand that having a minimum number of unforced errors does not guarantee you a win, at least in a professional tennis match. If you were to decide not to make any errors and just push the ball back, the opponent may hit a winner off every one of those balls and the points may not go down as unforced errors on your part but you would still lose the match 6-0, 6-0!

What happens on a lot of occasions at the professional level is that a player uses different methods to try to make the opponent 8216;go for more8217; on his shots and induces errors from him by forcing him to take a lot more chances.

I also believe that in analysing the negativity of unforced errors, one needs to take this figure in conjunction not only with the higher number of winners that the player hits but also with the number of unforced errors the opponent makes because the latter may well be a result of the pressure the player exerts on his opponent by threatening to go for the more risky strokes.

Having said this, I would be the first to reiterate that my own number of unforced errors needs to come down substantially, but the solution is nowhere as simple as some would like to believe.

In my case, one must also consider that my biggest strength is the power in my ground strokes and this comes from hitting a lot flatter than normal. In order to generate this kind of power, I need to take a few more risks and clear the net with a lesser margin than someone who plays more defensively.

It is also a fact that I use a lot more wrist in my strokes and it is always more difficult to maintain consistency on the movement of the wrist than it is to be consistent with the upper arm.

This is a style that has brought me to a career high of 31 in the world. To believe that by merely becoming a lot more safer in my approach and by changing the way I hit the ball at this stage of my career I could get to the Top 10 would be very naive.

The more practical solution is to reduce the errors by improving my physical fitness to reach more balls in a better position, a better choice of strokes at critical junctures and by technically trying to improve shots that cause the maximum number of errors including my serve.

All these can take months and years to perfect and there are no easy short-cuts in the brutally competitive world of international tennis. This is where the Sharapovas of the world have an edge over players like me. While they have been trained for a decade on these aspects when they were still developing in their formative years, I have to quickly overcome all my inadequacies under the blinding glare of the whole world if I am to survive at the highest level!

PMG/Globosport