Woodbridge: Make or break time for the Big Four

With a third of the season down, we could be witnessing something incredibly special – potentially once in a tennis lifetime.

When we look back at the first part of the year, nobody could have predicted the turnaround of the two greats: Roger’s dominance on the hard courts; Rafa finding form inch by inch up until the clay swing and then ‘boom’. He’s now odds on favourite to win the French Open.

The question now is: ‘does Roger even bother turning up in Paris?’ Given history, style and surface form, he won’t have played enough matches on clay to be able to beat Rafa at the French. Should he exert the effort required at Roland Garros, or should he save it for the grass court season?

My main concern for Rafa in the coming weeks is overplaying. He’s already won two clay events, and is scheduled to play both Madrid and Rome in the coming weeks. But to win a tenth Roland Garros he needs to go in as fresh as possible. Once you’re in your thirties, you have to respect your body – it doesn’t recover as well as it does in your mid-twenties. This is a period of physical management for him, confidence is at a high and I’m intrigued to see what his team decides to do.

In terms of rankings, it’s not about being the No.1 for these two anymore; it’s about accumulating Majors. For Roger, another Wimbledon would be icing on an incredible cake. For Rafa, to complete the trifecta of ten titles at one event would be a mind-boggling, unparalelled achievement.

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But where do the top two in the world fit in to this?

I’m somewhat perplexed at what has happened to Novak and, more so, Andy this year. Novak has come off a level and is trying to reset – a little like Rafa a couple of years ago. He will, in my view, get there, but it doesn’t look like it will happen this season.

Andy is a bigger worry for me. I often say that during a match a player can sometimes take a deep breath, let down their guard and not recover quickly enough. That seems to have been the case for Andy all season. Now is the time that he needs to turn things around, and quickly; clay is not his greatest surface, and there’s an enormous amount of pressure on him going into Wimbledon – no player in the world faces more media scrutiny than Murray does at that tournament. This next ten weeks will make or break his season.

My prediction for the next couple of months – the most important on the tennis calendar – is that Roger and Rafa will each win a major.

Novak needs to try and become a threat again. We haven’t seen him go deep enough at any event this year to take on either Roger or Rafa. He needs to put pressure on these two so that he can start to re-write the 2017 script.

For Andy, he has to get back in the mix and try to dominate. Perhaps Ivan Lendl needs to ‘poke the bear’ so to speak and get him out of hibernation. It’s time for him to re-ignite that competitive fire.