Surface Homogenization is the Biggest conspirancy in tennis ever!

Op is correct, at least as far as slams go. The difference in aces has actually increased instead of decreased.

oranges said:

It's well established how good he is on grass when it actually plays like grass i.e. fast with low and irregular bounces. More than likely, the two would never get to play him, just as Federer never got to play him in HC slams for years.

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Federer vs him on fast courts I agree. I've always felt the H2H was a little skewed because of Nadal not making it to Federer on grass/fast courts/indoor hards/second part of the season anywhere near as often as Federer did in the first.

But claiming Tsonga or Berdych would be taking slams off him on faster surfaces is pushing it too far. Honestly if they were that good, they'd have made more USO semis at least(which is probably among the fastest courts on tour today). There is not a single shred of evidence to suggest Tsonga or Berdych would take down Nadal on fast courts. AO 2008 match was on plexi so that's hardly indicative of how they'd go on a super fast court but even if you want to count that match, it is 1 match is 6 years.

Re. Nadal on grass - are you implying Nadal's last 3 exits at W have to do with the conditions playing like real grass? Otherwise it doesn't make sense. He made 5 finals from 2006-2011(missing 2009. If you are saying he has benefited from grass slowing down since 2003 or so then I definitely agree with you, but that's a different argument entirely. You can't say that it's well established how he is on fast grass when he hasn't played on fast grass.

I am only going to talk about the majors. It is well documented that they did change the surfaces of the majors in the last decade or so.

Wimbledon- Changed the grass combination and the hardness of the surface in 2001. This caused the ball to bounce more. The major change was in bounce, not speed. They also started to maintain courts better, which ensured no bad bounce. It is not a coincidence that two pure baseliners played the final for the first time in many many years in 2002. Federer also changed his style from SnV to attacking baseline tennis from 2003 onward and got instant success.

US Open- They slowed down the surface a little bit in 2003 and have been using the same combination since then.

RG- No real change, but with the use of lighter balls they tried to make it a little faster sometime in the last 10 years.

AO- Rebound ace was a horrible surface for the weather conditions in Australia. It could play faster or extremely slow depending on the weather. It used to get extremely sticky on a hot day. Plexicushion was better in those but the speed actually decreased slightly from 2008 when they changed it to Plexy. In 2013 they tried to quicken it up the Plexi surface and in 2014 it was quite faster and low bouncy (Darren Cahill mentioned that in the Federer-Nadal semi).