Service let: should it stay or should it go?

There was a fair amount of talk during this year's Wimbledon championships about possible candidates for changes in the tennis rules, often with a view to making the game quicker, and quieter. Areas talked about included the ludicrous "grunting" of several female players; the possible gamesmanship involved in an excessive use of the trainer/injury timeout; and the retaking of serves that have clipped the net. It is this last area - the service let rule - which we thought we'd investigate more closely. Our man Dupin was on the case...

The ‘Let during a service’ rule, viz. the retaking of a service when the ball served touches the net, strap or band and is otherwise good, has long been a subject of minor controversy. Martina Navratilova has been the most vociferous recent advocate of its abolition; other high-profile figures in favour of scrapping it are former Wimbledon champions John McEnroe, Pat Cash and Michael Stich.

The world governing body of tennis, the International Tennis Federation (ITF) – www.itftennis.com  - has a ‘no let rule’ in its ‘Alternative procedures and scoring methods’ appendix to the ‘Rules of tennis’, first established in 1924. Indeed, the ITF was set to pilot the change in 1998/1999 but was thwarted by resistance amongst the players.  The highest level of tennis that currently uses the ‘no let’ alternative is the US Collegiate circuit.

There are three basic arguments for changing the rule. The most commonly cited argument is that it would speed up the game. The second, and most divisive argument, is that it would introduce an exciting random element into the game (in the sense that an ordinary undeflected service has a predictable trajectory but the trajectory following a net cord deflection is, to all intents and purposes, unpredictable). The third argument is that the let is inconsistent with the rest of the game, in that, if a ball touches the net cord in a rally situation and stays in, then the point just continues.

The third argument seems to make sense but it runs up against the original spirit of the game, where the ‘service’ was seen as an honourable duty and should be a clean, untarnished delivery with which to start the rally. This is obviously a quaint anachronism in an age when most professional male players unceremoniously bang down ‘services’ at 120+ mph.

An additional argument at grass-roots level - where the requisite net cord technology is unavailable - is that scrapping the let would negate a large area of possible controversy, where the receiver claims, either genuinely or falsely, to have heard a net contact and asks for a let to be played.

As for the question of the pace of the game, I carried out a basic quantification of the time lost due to service lets by analysing the women’s and men’s singles finals at Wimbledon 2009. In the all-Williams women’s final, there were 9 service lets over the two sets played (5 from Serena, 4 from Venus); in the men’s final, Federer and Roddick both had 12 service lets over the marathon five-set encounter. Assuming the upper bound of 20 seconds for a service execution, this amounts to a total of 3 and 8 minutes ‘lost’ respectively, clearly a very small percentage of the total match times (and small beer in comparison to the total time spent at changeovers).

Of all the service lets in the two finals combined, there were only 3 ‘erratics’ - net cord deflections that significantly altered the ball trajectory, such that if play had continued, the receiver would not have been able to return the ball (these were all on the Federer serve).

In conclusion, whilst it can be objectively regarded as a vestigial oddity, there is no one compelling argument for abolishing the service let rule. Even in the relatively rare event of successive service lets occurring on the same point with a particularly slow player, e.g. chronic ball-bouncer Novak Djokovic, the irritation is minor. The purported sense of theatre that might result from the random element could be a farce – for a player to lose (or indeed, win) a Grand Slam on an 'erratic' that dribbles over the net would surely be even more galling than a penalty shoot-out defeat in football.

Comments

[journeyman]

Interesting thought. How about we go one better and abolish the second serve? The serve in general is still too dominant, especially on grass. Do the likes of Roddick and Federer really need two attempts to bang down a serve, with the first simply a free shot at an ace? Yes, the prospect of achieving a break of serve has an inherent drama, but wouldn't a freer exchange of games make for better tennis?

[Speedball2]

Do we really want to see points as dull as net cord aces? Why not get rid of the let, and just call it out? That will get rid of the extra time of the let too!