Oh, so so annoying.

I know I have said here that we must be prepared for times when Andy's game doesn't seem to advance forward but plateaus, and I think some people, even on this sensible board, are too critical at times, and expect too much, but there appears to be one fundamental problem at the moment :

SERVICE !!!

Whatever they ( Petchey ? ) has been trying to do with his service clearly is far from working at the moment.  I hear that he's tried to slow it down to produce more accuaracy.  Well, although in some matches I have noticed it seemingly a bit more accuarate, if rather tame, yesterday we had the worst of both worlds. :   54% accuracy  and when he did get his first serve in , he won 24/49,  49 %  ( yes, 49% ! )  of the points.  Flippin heck he had 60% success on second service ( actually quite impressive ).  I have never seen service stats so mixed up as that.

I am no expert ( far from it ! ), but to me he last year he had a pretty impressive service ( I was surprised by the power when I first saw it ),  and surely you spend a lot of time working to improve the accuracy but NOT taking most of the pace of it.  He has now recently lost 2 close games, with Davydenko and Wawrinka, where he has had loads of breaks of serve, certainly plenty to be winning any match, but has conceded far too many of his owm serve. 6 breaks each last night, think it was worse against Davydenko, who to be fair is a superb returner but still.

I don't think I am being overcritical because I'd say he still seems to be fundamentally playing well in points, it's not as if he's making loads more unforced errors ( 39 to Wawrinka's 64 ). 

In fact it says a hell of a lot for the young man that he is so close to winning these matches with service stats like that.

However, that's 3 Grand Slams and Masters Series gone with one this year with one win.  They are going to count for 13 of his 18 countable points this season.  So no matter he does well in other tournaments ( and San Jose was such an unexpected joy ), he better start delivering soon in the more major tournamensts.  At least on clay, his service won't be such a sitting duck, but I think I like others, had seen more hard court potential.

Grrrr, so so annoying.