Does Djokovic Have a Weak Overhead ?

four years ago in an interview with graham Bessinger Novak jokovic was asked what his biggest weakness was and Novak Joko paused repeated the question you can tell that he was ready to give a very meaningful and thoughtful answer and he replied with the following my biggest strength and weakness at the same time is the ability to comprehend things at a deeper level and this is a truly profound statement that somewhat CP but you can read into this in several different ways see the game of tennis constantly puts obstacles in your way and it's up to you to basically problem solve there's no question that no other player in history has been able to problem solve as well as jokovic tennis is a game of failures you are constantly missing shots losing points and losing matches so overcoming these obstacles is what the game of tennis is all about at the mental level so I love this answer from jokovic and out of curiosity I opened up the comment section and what I saw there was nah bro your overhead is your biggest weakness so it is no secret that Novak jokovic has some issues with his overhead after all it's called the Joko Smash and Boris Becker his former coach said that jokovic has the weakest Smash in the top 100 so before I get into jok which is overhead problems let's first talk about what a sound overhead technique is so the overhead swing is very similar to the serve but it's not exactly like the serve because we're not tossing the ball to ourselves we have to track the ball that's coming from the other side so footwork is going to be crucial generally at the high level players get quality lobs and they actually have to move backwards to hit the overhead and generally they're going to be jumping off the back leg and landing on the front leg to hit the overhead the goal is to make contact in front of your head on the overhead you don't want to make contact behind your head you also want to make contact slight to your right you are not going to be able to bend your body like you are on the serve and make contact at 12:00 or 11:00 it is crucial that your body is somewhat upright and that you make contact around 1:00 other than that the swing is going to be very similar to a serve the trajectory is going to be different so it's going to be more of a downward motion and there is an option to put Slice on the overhead you'll see this more on a bouncing overhead not so much on an overhead that's taken out of the air and it is absolutely impossible to do any type of kick when it comes to the overhead because you would have to make contact on the left side of your head and this is something that's very difficult to do out of the air and it makes no sense in the context of what you're trying to do with your overhead which is slam the ball down into the ground and make it bounce very high up so that the other person can't reach it so Joko obviously has all the fundamentals on the overhead he does have a deep racket drop he does have a torso rotation he does make contact in front of his head he does finish the overhead properly and and he generally does have good footwork on the overhead so this is evident on the overheads that jokovic makes however on the overhead that jokovic misses you are going to see some fundamental flaws and the biggest problem that jokovic has is commitment to the shot because like Becker said it's in his head there is a lack of trust so what I mean by lack of commitment is that when Joko shs the overhead he doesn't fully commit to it you will often see that post the moment of contact the upper body will be completely straight and it's just the arm swinging downward so the body is not really helping him out the body is not accommodating the swing path in addition to that and this is hard to believe jokovic sometimes has poor footwork on the overhead he just simply does not move his feet so Jo which is one of the best movers in the history of tennis however on the overhead he's often flat footed He doesn't move enough as Becker said he jumps when he really doesn't have to jump and there's something that you want to remember it's completely unnecessary to jump on the overhead unless the ball is going behind you with pretty good penetration then you're going to jump off your back foot and land on the front foot however if you're more in a stationary position it makes absolutely no sense to jump so it's either a joker which doesn't doesn't move his feet enough or that he jumps when he doesn't have to and loses his balance so what ends up happening is that he often makes contact at very awkward places he will make contact behind his head he will make contact way too far to the left and he does make a lot of overhead mistakes and what's so frustrating for jokovic and where I think this all stems from is that he misses extremely easy overhead so even when he's very close to the net the entire court is open he will miss a very easy overhead whether he's spraying it long or into the net so when that happens to you at crucial moments in a match it's very similar to a second serve issue where you lose confidence you're going to lose trust in the shot and what ends up happening is when you lose trust you're not going to have the same commitment that you have when you do have confidence and when you don't have the commitment to actually hit the shot you're being careful with it you're going to start missing it and it's going to be especially evident and crucial moments of the match so it's unlikely that Joko is going to miss an overhead one all in the first set but there is a small chance that Joko is going to miss an overhead when it's four all 30 all in the fifth set now how do you fix a problem like that well if you listen to Becker's statements about J which is overhead they really tried they hit a tremendous amount of overheads in practice and the frustrating thing is that jokovic does have a fundamentally sound overhead and he's one of the best athletes that we've ever seen on the tennis court so it's all about starting to make these overheads in matches as he continues to miss overheads here and there this will stay in his head so it's basically having the trust to go for it in very crucial situations in the match and it's easy to say that standing here it's another thing trying to execute that on the match court does the fact that Jo misses some overheads here and there have an effect on his results in other words could he have won more Grand Slams if he had a better overhead not at all first of all JT is a baseline player he has improved his Net game tremendously if you watch jokovic voling in 2023 for example the tournament Cincinnati or even in the US Open final against medev jokovic is volleying a lot better and in my opinion the overhead has improved so I think that jovic used to miss more overheads than he does now but if you remember what I started my video with Joko is one of the greatest of all time at problem solving so even though jokich might miss on overhead at four all 30 all in the fifth set he is so good at processing that mistake and playing his best tennis on the next point that I don't think that missing overheads has any effect on his results after all he's breaking all the records and he won every single tournament that you can win