Roger Federer is contented to end this year as World Number Two.
It took Roger 5 years to win a Grand Slam again, and he ended up winning two, which probably completed one of the most celebrated comebacks in sporting history. During the ongoing World Tour Finals, Federer spoke about how he was happy to be back on court and wasn’t thinking too much about the World Number 1 ranking, especially with the kind of schedule he was opting for.
Plausibly, the 19-time Grand Slam champion would finish his 2017 tennis season as the World Number two tennis player and his long-time rival, Rafael Nadal, bearing the top spot. If the Swiss legend wraps up this week’s ATP finals, he would be 140 points behind Rafael Nadal(who has already withdrawn from the World Tour Finals)
At this point in time, Federer believes that it better to focus on his game rather than the year-end ATP crown as it would have an unnecessary stress on his mind and body. Also, winning grand slams seems to be the priority for Federer at this stage, and he will have to skip a lot of ATP Masters in order to do that.
Federer has intelligently chosen his tournaments this year and produced fruitful results in most of them. The maestro also withdrew from this year’s clay-court season in order to concentrate on Wimbledon and his decision of not playing was commendable.
A long-break on tennis in 2016 and playing selective tournaments in 2017 worked out for Federer, “Look, it’s not a realistic goal in some ways, the World No 1. It is interesting. It’s the ultimate achievement in tennis in some ways, it always has been for me. But at this age, it just can’t be because I think I’ll make mistakes if I start chasing it. I’m not sure how much the body allows me to chase goals like this. Maybe if I start thinking about it too often and too much, I think I’m maybe also not playing the way I’m supposed to be playing. Maybe I tense up, maybe I’m nervous, maybe that’s not good for my back. Who knows what it is.”
Both Federer and Nadal will have a lot of points to defend in the opening half of the 2018 season, but more so for Nadal, who played the entire Clay season(and ended up dominating it too).
Federer is going to be shrewd next season too, and is going to channel all his energy towards winning one more(if not more) Grand Slams!
