{"id":106872,"date":"2026-06-17T13:28:16","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T17:28:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=106872"},"modified":"2026-06-17T13:28:16","modified_gmt":"2026-06-17T17:28:16","slug":"big-servers-andrey-rublev","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2026\/06\/17\/big-servers-andrey-rublev\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Big Servers Keep Beating Andrey Rublev"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrey Rublev is a top-fifteen player in the world with 17 career titles, two Masters 1000 trophies, and generally a level of baseline consistency that very few players on tour can match over a full season. He is also 2-5 against Hubert Hurkacz<\/a>, 4-6 against Taylor Fritz<\/a>, 1-3 against John Isner<\/a>, 0-3 against Jakub Mensik, and 0-2 against Ben Shelton. Those are not random results distributed across a career but a very specific, recurring problem against a specific type of player.<\/span><\/p>\n

The common thread across every name on that list is the serve. Hurkacz has one of the most complete deliveries on tour. Fritz is among the top five servers in the world on a given week. Isner built his entire career on a delivery that opponents could not neutralize no matter how well they anticipated it. Mensik and Shelton are both players whose serve output is elite and whose games revolve around winning free points with it. Against all of them, Rublev’s record is either losing or barely breaking even. Against most of the rest of the tour, he is one of the most reliable performers alive.<\/span><\/p>\n

His return metrics have improved marginally in the past twelve months, which is worth acknowledging. But marginally is doing a lot of work in that sentence. He is still not winning second-serve return points at the rate a player of his level should be, and against the heaviest first serves in the game, the problem is more pronounced still.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why can’t Andrey Rublev beat big servers?<\/h2>\n

Rublev’s Technique Causes the Problem<\/b><\/h3>\n

The reason Rublev struggles against big servers is not primarily mental or tactical. It is mechanical, and that distinction matters because it points toward a problem with no clean solution.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rublev’s groundstrokes are built around a wrist-dominant swing. The snap and flex in his wrist at the point of contact is the primary source of his power generation, which is why his forehand and backhand are so effective when he has time to set up and execute. The technique allows him to generate enormous pace with a relatively compact motion and is central to his identity as a ball striker. It is also the exact technique that struggles most against incoming heavy pace.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Wrist-dependent swings require precise timing above everything else. When a player is constructing the point and controlling rally tempo, that timing is achievable because the variables are manageable. When a 220 km\/h serve is landing in the corner and the contact window is measured in fractions of a second, the margin for that snap to land correctly collapses. Too early and the ball flies wide or long. Too late and the frame catches it or the return drops short. The wrist provides the power, but against genuine pace it becomes a liability because it demands a level of timing that the situation cannot reliably provide.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is not something Rublev has developed recently. He has played this way since he was a junior, which means the technique is deeply ingrained and not something that can be rebuilt without dismantling everything that makes him effective from the baseline. It is also worth noting the physical cost of this approach over time. Players who load heavily through the wrist, Nadal for spin generation, Alcaraz for a combination of spin and power, and Dominic Thiem in a slightly different application, all carry elevated wrist injury risk as a direct consequence. Rublev has already dealt with wrist issues across his career, and the reason for that is the same reason his return struggles against heavy serving: the joint is doing too much work.<\/span><\/p>\n

Comparing to Other Players<\/b><\/h3>\n

The contrast between Rublev’s technique and the two other players at the very top of the game illustrates why this matters at the highest level.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jannik Sinner’s<\/a> technique is built around body and leg drive rather than wrist involvement. His forehand and backhand are generated from shoulder rotation and weight transfer, with the wrist largely passive through the swing. The practical consequence of this is that Sinner can return heavy serves effectively because his timing requirements are less punishing.<\/span><\/p>\n

He does not need the wrist snap to land perfectly because the power is coming from his core and shoulders. The tradeoff is structural: the degree of shoulder and upper body rotation he uses through every swing will accumulate stress in that region over time, which may explain some of the physical challenges he has encountered. His technique also demands exceptional positioning, because the late-contact swing he prefers requires him to be in exactly the right place. When his movement is sharp he is essentially unreachable from the baseline. When it is not, he can be pressured.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Djokovic’s technique is the standard against which everything else is measured. His swing is balanced and smooth, generating power through a classical combination of leg drive, rotation, and clean contact rather than any single mechanical source. He modified his forehand in the last few years to shorten the swing and extract pace more quickly, acknowledging that the extended baseline wars of his earlier career were no longer viable options as his physical profile changed. The result is a technique that distributes stress evenly and carries low injury risk over the long term.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rublev sits at the other end of the spectrum from both. More reliant on a single joint, more vulnerable when timing is disrupted, and more exposed when the pace of the incoming ball exceeds what his wrist-led swing can handle in the available contact window.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Conclusion Is Uncomfortable<\/b><\/h3>\n

Rublev will keep losing to big servers at a rate that does not fit his ranking. He doesn\u2019t lack the tactical intelligence to devise a solution, but the solution would require remodeling a swing he has used his entire professional life. The risk of attempting that is higher than the cost of living with the limitation. No coach is going to strip out the technique that has produced 18 titles and two Masters 1000 trophies on the basis that it produces losing records against a subset of opponents.<\/span><\/p>\n

What that means in practice is that Rublev’s ceiling at the biggest events will continue to be capped by draw luck. A path to a Grand Slam final that avoids Shelton, Fritz, and Hurkacz until the later rounds is a path where Rublev is dangerous. A draw that puts one of them across the net in the second week is close to a guaranteed exit. He is an elite player working with a structural ceiling, and the most honest assessment of his career from here is that the ceiling is unlikely to move. The technique that defines him also confines him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Main photo credit: Susan Mullane-USA TODAY Sports<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrey Rublev is a top-fifteen player in the world with 17 career titles, two Masters 1000 trophies, and generally a level of baseline consistency that very few players on tour can match over a full season. He is also 2-5 against Hubert Hurkacz, 4-6 against Taylor Fritz, 1-3 against John Isner, 0-3 against Jakub Mensik, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5393,"featured_media":87031,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,15913],"tags":[511,16662,2916,18805,412,347],"class_list":["post-106872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atp","category-opinion","tag-andrey-rublev","tag-ben-shelton","tag-hubert-hurkacz","tag-jakub-mensik","tag-john-isner","tag-taylor-fritz"],"modified_by":"Jim Smith","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106872"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":106894,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106872\/revisions\/106894"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87031"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}