Robotic Raonic stands as a warning to game seeking future greats
With Nadal, Djokovic and Murray all showing signs of age, there are too many sluggers and not enough craftsmen among the next generation bidding to take their place
Milos Raonic offers a portal into a parallel universe for men’s tennis. To follow his numbingly one-note performance against Roger Federer this week, as he served straight into the Swiss strike zone and ran repeatedly around his own backhand, was to catch a glimpse of the future and shudder. Some years ago, the Canadian was introduced at a tour event in Tokyo to a contraption called the Raonic Robot, a shiny, faceless slab of machinery that did nothing but blast balls from a great height at 140mph. In retrospect, it was a fairly uncanny likeness.
Off court, Raonic can be a stubbornly blank canvas. There are fleeting shafts of light, not least when he divulges his passion for Andy Warhol exhibitions, but when his most memorable line is to call himself the “CEO of Milos Raonic Tennis”, you realise he is hardly a raconteur on a par with Goran Ivanisevic, who once described his penchant for throwing rackets thus: “I tossed it nicely, and it landed nicely, like an airplane. No warning, beautiful. That’s the art.”
Blame, of course, should not rest squarely with Raonic for the deficiencies of those players seeking to usurp the Big Four. But he is emblematic of the identikit crash-bangwallop baseliners whose power is not proportional to any subtlety or guile. Where Federer has been variously compared to Michelangelo and Johann Sebastian Bach, Tomas Berdych, his opponent in today’s semi-final, has said of his matches: “I can see they’re quite boring to watch.”
Even allowing for the stunning resurgence of