Standing deep is a decision, not a style

Retreating three metres behind the baseline buys you time and hands over roughly a metre of court on every reply.

There's a habit that creeps into a player's game so gradually that nobody, including the player, notices it happening. The return position drifts back. Then the rally position drifts back to match it. Within a season you're standing four metres behind the baseline in neutral exchanges and you've convinced yourself it's your style.

It isn't a style. It's a trade, and it's usually a bad one.

What you buy by standing deep is time. The ball arrives after its peak, it's slowed down, and you get an extra fraction of a second to set your feet. That's genuinely valuable against a huge hitter or a ball that's kicking above your shoulder, and there's nothing wrong with using it as a specific tactic.

What you pay is geometry, and the cost is steeper than it looks. From four metres behind the baseline, the angles available to your opponent widen enormously, because a cross-court ball that would have been reachable at the baseline now lands wide of you with a bounce that carries it further away. Meanwhile your own reply has to travel further, which means it arrives later and slower, which means your opponent has more time. You've given him the thing you took for yourself. And the recovery distances get brutal: covering the same width from further back means running a longer arc after every ball.

Endurance is where it bites hardest. Deep positioning costs metres, and metres cost legs. A player standing on the baseline covers substantially less ground over a two-hour match than the same player standing three metres back, and by the third set the deep-standing player is the one whose first step has gone. Then, because he's tired, he retreats further. It's a loop that finishes with a player who can no longer finish points and blames his fitness.

The remedy is uncomfortable and simple: half-volley more. Take the ball on the rise, accept a lower contact point, hit with less spin and more drive. You will make more errors for a fortnight. What you get is a court that has shrunk, an opponent whose recovery time is halved, and a match in which your own energy expenditure per point has gone down noticeably.

The good court-position players in the game aren't the ones who never retreat. They're the ones who retreat on purpose, for one shot, and get back in immediately. Position should be a choice you re-make every ball, not a place you moved to and forgot to leave.