Its the most telling statistic in men's tennis. The GOAT, the Greatest Player of All Time, has never been able to dominate his closest rival and with this week's losing match to Rafa, the H2H now stands at 18-9 in Rafa's favour.
So lets discuss this. Now it has forever been dismissed as an unreal statistic because they have largely played on clay. Hhmm. Or its simply because Rafa is just such an awful match up for Feds. Aaah, so their results don't count then because Feds is always at such a huge disadvantage because of said match up; but the awful match up Rafa has against Djokovic, well, in that instance results do count, even though Djokovic would have to win a further 19 times to Rafa's 0 to make their H2H read as the Rafa/Feds one does today.
Feds is now a 30 year-old-man, so maybe results now don't count also because of that. But then when he faced an 18 year-old-boy, they did. And of course when Rafa wasn't good enough to meet Feds in all those hardcourt finals, that skewed it, but now that Federer hasn't been good enough to meet Rafa in finals, we'll gloss over that, shall we?
Rafa is the clay court specialist. Federer being a 6 time Wimbledon winner, 5 time US Open winner and a 4 time Australian Open winner, well its safe to say he can be considered the grass/hardcourt specialist, eh? But whereas Rafa trounces Federer on the clay 12-2, poor old Feds suffering from that dreadful match up (which miraculously disappears indoors), well, this grass court/hardcourt genius can only muster a 8-7 advantage on those surfaces. Dash that match up. But note that they have played 14 times on clay, and 13 times on grass/hardcourt. Skewed?
Anyhow ... the purpose of wrapping words in this post was seriously only a way of introducing this lovely sideshow of their matches. Hehe ... ;)
Where Rafa features heavily ...
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