The lost grasscourt art of serve-and-volley tactics looks set to have a big impact again at Wimbledon. Reuters reports from London

THE yellowing obituaries are looking premature as serve-and-volley tennis creeps, with a few tweaks, towards a renaissance of sorts.

A number of top men are leading the charge and, in a curious twist, the same blend of technology and lung-busting fitness blamed for allbut killing off this style of play is behind its resurgence.

As players hit harder shots, miss fewer balls and run for hour upon hour, competitors need a ploy to shorten points.

Introducing, or perhaps it’s a case of re-introducing... the good old serve-and-volley. It is an old-school move which, used selectively, may become the newest potent weapon in the armoury of modern players.

“At the moment you see the guys winning the slams from the baseline,” former tour pro and leading coach and tennis analyst Darren Cahill said. “But then you see the great players of today working on their net games, because they know it saves them physically because they have to work so hard to win points.

“Over the course of a grand slam, seven matches, best of five, they are looking at ways to shorten points to save as much energy as they can.

“I think Novak, Rafa and Roger are coming in way more than they were four or five years ago,” Cahill said of Djokovic, Nadal and Federer.

Time was that unless you knew the dark arts of serve-and-volley, you could forget winning Wimbledon.

Even baseliner Bjorn Borg would roll his rounded shoulders into the ball and race to the net at the All Eng-