First it was great to see a confrontation between to great young tennis players, second I was pleasantly surprised at the wide variety of shots  Andrey Golubev showed on his first Wimbledon match of importance and particularly the speed and ease of execution. Very impressive package!

On grass many of your defensive skills, are often better translated into aggression and by that I mean, going for your shots when pulled out of position than rather try go get back in play with a conventional defensive play.

Why?

At Wimbledon or on any lawn tennis play your opponents will get smart quickly, move in behind powerful strokes and will volley punish your floaters or anything of lesser speed or placement mercilessly.

Andrey Golubev in this video lesson was put in trouble and on the run by a huge backhand down the line from Jo-Wilfried Tsonga but got himself out of it brilliantly.

Why, when and how should we go for broke with a winning forehand?

- Pressure - Opponents have you on all over the court and you find yourself running out of options.

- Tactics - You need to assert yourself as a confident passer and you are not going to let an attacker bully you out of a match.

- Technique - Your strokes and movement have to be at a very high level, in this frame you will see that  Andrey Golubev will pull a cross court forehand winner against the flow of Jo-Wilfried Tsongas movement and succeed to pass him. Important to note Golubevs only worry was to get behind the ball, the racket head well into the right side of it and whipping it hard upwards on the right side of his head (instead of the classical across the body over to left side finish) .

- Results -  You perfect this winning forehand shot on any surface during practice, but clay is ideal because of the forgiveness of the surface and if you have to repeat this sequence several times you will not have the grass courts grounds keeper all upset at you tearing the courts up. 

You can try also on hard courts, but even though as an attacker I did not mind hard courts, I find that the toll on hips and joints can be high. 

Whenever possible when I trained Jim Courier, I did all the training hard work on clay in the mornings and if there was a hard court tournament ahead, then match play on hard court in the afternoon was scheduled.

This was and is something that I have in mind for all players I train and I think it paid off for Jim who had an excellent career almost injury free. Hope it will pay off for you too.  :-)

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