How Taylor Fritz Weakened Rafa Jodar's Powers in DC Final | Monday Match Analysis

**Gill Gross** (0:01)
Welcome, everyone, to Monday Match Analysis. I'm Gill Gross. Taylor Fritz is champion in Washington, DC. He wins his biggest title since 2022 And he beats Rafa Jodar in the final, which means, for the first time ever on Monday Match Analysis, I think the first time of many, we get to break down a big Rafael Jodar match. There's going to be a lot of visuals. There's going to be a little bit of film breakdown on this edition of Monday Match Analysis that is the trade-off because I know that we've waited a little bit longer for this episode. I'm going to make it up to you with some really good visuals for the YouTube viewers. But it will still be good for the audio listeners, as always. I love everybody who watches and listens to the show. All right, before we get into the specifics of the final, real quick, Fritz, season check, big picture.
Look, he's had some tough circumstances. Easy to forget that the knee problem basically shot his off season. He did not spend December training hard and sharpening his skills. He spent most of December resting and trying to get healthy and, you know, keeping the load low. Then, of course, the knee was not good at the start of the season. He shut it down for the clay court season. He didn't win a single match on clay, even though he came back to play Geneva and Roland Garros. And he's also played, up until this point, three finals and none of those three finals went his way. And those are big swing matches for the rankings, right? The further you go in a tournament, the more each match matters in terms of how many rankings points are on the line. Despite all of that, he ends up eighth in the race heading into the National Bank Open in Canada. That's pretty impressive. I think that deserves a lot of props.
In addition to that, one of the really bad stats for Taylor, and I kind of winked at it at the start here, he hadn't won a title above 250 since Tokyo 2022 I think that's going to be one that Taylor Fritz is going to be very glad that he has shed. As for the final itself, I looked at the way these two matched up, watched every point of the match, of course, as I always do, and I think that Taylor, not because he necessarily tailored a specific game plan to beat Jodar, but just the way Fritz's game matched up against Jodar's, I think that he did a masterful job of attacking Jodar's weaknesses and mitigating the young Spaniard's strengths. So I want to start there. Let's start with the strengths. Let's start positive. What is Rafa Jodar really good at, and how did Fritz mute some of those strengths, contain them, because you're never going to go a whole match against a great player, and they're never going to get what they want, but you can try to limit how often they get what they want. So let's start by talking about something that I think Jodar is really, really good at. That is attacking balls that come short to his backhand.
Most players on the ATP Tour aren't great at this. Most are great at punishing short balls to their forehand, the big weapon, the shot that 99% of players hit much bigger than their backhand. The reason Jodar is so good at punishing short balls to his backhand is mainly, in my view, because of his feet.
Does he hit it pretty hard? Sure. Is it as big as most forehands? No. The way he is able to produce the kind of damage on it that he does is by taking time away. And it is, first and foremost, a recognition thing. I think Jodar has great eyes. We'll talk more about that in a moment. I think he's got great eyes in the sense that he reads the ball coming off of his opponent's racket very quickly. The recognition on any ball that he can lean on that comes to his backhand. When I say lean on, I mean he's taking two positive forward steps into his backhand, so he's got the body weight moving through the shot. He recognizes any ball that he has the ability to do that on right away, very quickly. And then he's shuffling inside the court, getting downhill, so to speak. And it's remarkable how well he does this.
You need a short ball to do it. Jodar is typically going to get that ball off of a right-hander's cross-court backhand. Not really Taylor Fritz's. Fritz's backhand, it's the ball control that makes that shot special. It's not the speed on the shot.