Shanghai, Sunday night. Alex de Minaur had just gone past Rei Sakamoto in the third round of the Masters 1000, and he talked rules more than tennis. The world No 9 wants a server to be allowed one ball toss, and no more.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would only allow one ball toss,\u201d he said in his press conference. \u201cOnce you have tossed the ball, you have to serve whatever happens. If you decide not to, it\u2019s a fault.\u201d He is after a habit every returner knows: the toss let go at the moment of contact, followed by a routine started from scratch. \u201cIt\u2019s a kind of trick players sometimes take advantage of: when they are about to serve and they miss their toss, they can start their whole routine again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The current rule gives the server 25 seconds before the first serve, with the clock starting once the chair umpire has called the point. Between first and second serve, no time is counted. A server who lets his toss go can breathe, reset his routine, and send a returner who had just found his timing back to zero. De Minaur also backs a set delay between first and second serve: two sides of the same time gain.<\/p>\n
Brad Gilbert, the former coach of Agassi, Roddick, Murray and Gauff, cheered him on X: \u201cHe\u2019s 1000% right, I\u2019ve been saying for 40 years that it\u2019s ridiculous you can get as many redos on ball toss as you want.\u201d<\/p>\n
No reform is on the table at the ATP or the ITF: this is one player\u2019s view, not a calendar. A player who knows his subject: de Minaur returned to competition in Shanghai five days after retiring from the Beijing final against Djokovic, and his round-of-16 match against Karen Khachanov comes on Wednesday. As the rule stands, a missed toss still costs nothing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Through to the Shanghai third round, Alex de Minaur wants to ban the free second ball toss and cap the wait between first and second serve. A player\u2019s view, not an ATP project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":7683,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-image":"","_yoast_wpseo_opengraph-image-id":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter-image":"","_yoast_wpseo_twitter-image-id":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"ba_sport":[],"class_list":["post-7682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n