Wimbledon 2018: Milos Raonic leads the way as big servers join the party

Wednesday was a day for flying ants, who descended on the courts in mid-afternoon in large numbers, and flying balls, with some of the game’s biggest – and tallest – servers in action

As Wimbledon’s ball boys and ball girls can testify, there are some big servers around these days. Twenty-four hours after a girl was reduced to tears when she was hit by one of Nick Kyrgios’ thunderbolts, a boy and a girl on Court 2 were both left with reminders of the power of Milos Raonic’s serve.

“I think the boy was OK,” Raonic said after his 7-6, 7-6, 7-6 victory over Australia’s John Millman. “I hit a girl a little lower in the abdomen. I think she probably took a little bit more of a grunt than he did in that sense. I hope she’s doing OK.”

Wednesday was a day for flying ants, who descended on the courts in mid-afternoon in large numbers, and flying balls, with some of the game’s biggest – and tallest – servers in action.

Ivo Karlovic (6ft 11in) hit 61 aces against Germany’s Jan-Lennard Struff but lost 6-7, 3-6, 7-6, 7-6, 13-11 after a contest that lasted nearly four hours. Both players broke serve just once in the whole match.

Raonic (6ft 5in) hit 34 aces in his victory over Millman, while Sam Querrey (6ft 6in) struck a modest 17 in beating Sergiy Stakhovsky 7-6, 6-3, 6-3. John Isner (6ft 10in) got into a five-set marathon against Ruben Bemelmans, while Kevin Anderson (6ft 8in) was slugging it out with Andreas Seppi.

Querrey believes that one of the biggest differences between grass and other surfaces is the effectiveness of a big serve.

“If my first serve goes in on grass it’s going to be harder for someone to time it and get it into the court,” he said. “That’s the biggest difference. You get more free points -- not necessarily aces, but balls that aren’t coming back in, just because it’s so difficult on grass to return it in time.”

Juan Martin del Potro, who hit 22 aces in his first-round victory over Peter Gojowczyk and now faces another big server in Feliciano Lopez, said that serves and how you perform on break points were the keys to success on grass.

“There could be only one break point during the match and that could be the key,” he said. “If you have a good serve on grass, you can win a lot of matches. Feliciano has a big serve. I am serving well, too, so we will see what will happen.”

Isner said that playing on grass always helped his serve. “But I like my serve in any conditions,” he added. “If we played in mud, I’d like my serve.

“Grass definitely gives it a little bit of an extra boost. It skids through. My big serves in essence feel even bigger when I make it, and it’s shooting through the court. Grass has always been a good servers’ surface, and it’s always been one for me.”

Raonic’s victory demonstrated how crucial a big serve can be on grass. There were only two breaks of serve in the whole match, which was decided by three tie-breaks. What might have happened to Raonic had he not hit 34 aces compared with just three by Millman?

The 27-year-old Canadian thinks that one of the reasons why so many tall players are successful in the modern game is advances in modern training methods.

Milos Raonic has one of the biggest serves on the tour (Getty Images)

“Before, everybody used to train the way a tennis player should train,” he said. “People didn’t make individual training programmes.I think the big guys realised: ‘Hey, this is what we need to do to get the most out of ourselves.’ You see guys moving more efficiently. You have Nick [Kyrgios], who’s incredibly athletic. You have Del Potro who I would say is one of the better movers, especially laterally. I think I move OK.

“You have guys who are getting better at these things because they are looking for programmes and techniques that are going to suit them best.”

Raonic shares second place with Sam Groth on the all-time list of Wimbledon’s fastest serves. Taylor Dent, who hit a 148mph serve in 2010, occupies top spot. Groth hit a 147mph serve in 2015, which Raonic matched one year later.

The player who hit the most aces in the first round this week was Kyrgios. The Australian, whose fast service action is particularly difficult for opponents to read, hit 42 aces in beating Denis Istomin.

Kyrgios, who stands 6ft 4in tall, said his service action had been the same since he was 10 years old. “My serve’s been like this ever since I was a little kid,” he said. “It was my best shot. I always based my game around it.

“It was one shot where I didn’t really practise much at all. I would hit maybe 10 or 15 serves a day. I would just relax, throw the ball up and hit it as hard as I could. I guess just one day it started winning me easy points. I was, like: this is better than running.”

To this day Kyrgios never practises his serve. “I will never, ever go out on the practice court and hit serves just for the sake of hitting serves,” he said. “I don’t even hit any serves. I always play points out of the hand and maybe roll my arm over maybe five, ten times and that’s it.”

Isner rejects the idea that some of the biggest servers owe everything to their height. “I don’t think the big guys like myself get our due for how hard we work,” he said. “I don’t go out to practise and just roll over a few serves and call it a day. I work hard on the court, off the court.”

The serve is usually less of a deciding factor in women’s tennis, though it can be a crucial weapon for players like Madison Keys and Serena Williams.

Keys hit six aces in her 6-4, 6-3 victory over Luksika Kumkhum, though she had a confession to make when asked whether she enjoyed watching some of the big servers in the men’s game. “I’m going to be totally honest with you,” Keys said. “I find it kind of boring.”