THE RACKET

Pock, pock, pock. It is a familiar sound for any tennis-lover, but this is no ordinary court.

A squat little box is firing balls into my forehand corner. The idea is to try out a series of rackets, including Roger Federer’s choice, the Wilson Pro Staff RF97. However, it is the human element that is proving uncooperative. With several technicians looking on, it is not only the racket that keeps changing, but my entire swing path.

I am standing in the Racquet Room, a space-age court at the end of Australia’s National Tennis Centre in Melbourne, where professional players come to road-test different frames and string combinations.

The Racquet Room is run by the Game Insight Group, an analytical team led by Greg Rusedski’s former coach, Dr Machar Reid. It is equipped with high-speed cameras that measure the speed, spin and accuracy of each shot. For an amateur hacker, whose groundstrokes are falling short of the professional tour average by around 40mph, this is a humbling experience.

Still, if you have ever wanted to play tennis like Roger Federer, the Racquet Room is a good place to start. I am holding an exact copy of his racket – a slimline, charcoalcoloured frame that somehow manages to put one in mind of an expensive sports car.

According to Federer, the RF97 – which he designed himself – was a game-changer. “2014 is when I feel like a new career started, because of the racket,” he told me during an interview last year.

Up until that point, Federer had stubbornly stuck with a 90-square-inch head while the rest of the tour migrated upwards. From 2014, he switched to 97 inches, while continuing his policy of weighting the handle.

The upshot is that Federer uses a heavier racket than anyone else (see table).

And yet the way it is balanced makes it unusually “head-light”, to use the industry jargon. Or manoeuvrable, as a layman might say.

This in turn enables Federer to swish the RF97 around in all manner of glorious carves and swoops.

He is the ultimate purist’s player – and this racket is a purist’s racket. Personally, I am not getting much out of the RF97, for the simple reason that I am not very good at tennis.

I have a short, faltering forehand swing. Whereas Federer’s forehand – in the words of the late American novelist David Foster Wallace – is a “great liquid whip”.

The extra inertia provided by the heavy handle is no problem for Federer. He unleashes fluid strokes from his shoulder, his whole arm flowing through like a whip.

But the RF97 is not designed for clubbies. It slows my crabby swing down to the point where the ball is only just creeping over the net.

Rafael Nadal’s racket – the Babolat Pure Aero – could hardly be more different.

With the weight at the far tip, I feel like I barely have to touch the ball before it screams into the back wall without bouncing.

I am running into a different issue now: my wrist is too rigid on contact. As a result, I am not flicking the strings over the ball like Nadal does, generating more than 3,000 revolutions per minute and making it dive down once it has cleared the net.

I go away with a firm recommendation from the Racquet Room – which will also advise amateurs, for a fee.

My best option is Venus Williams’s choice – the Wilson Blade 104, a sort of “Goldilocks” racket that is neither too hot nor too cold.

It is the nearest thing to an idiot-proof solution that the experts can provide.