A high first serve percentage often means you served too safely

Landing seventy five per cent of first serves is usually evidence that the first ball was not doing enough work.

Commentators treat first serve percentage as a virtue, and a player who lands three quarters of them gets praised for consistency. Sometimes that is right. Often it means he took the sting out of his best shot to protect a statistic nobody should care about in isolation.

The serve is a two-attempt shot, and that structure is the whole reason it can be aggressive. You get to take a genuine risk on the first ball because a miss costs you very little, only the difference between playing the point from a first serve and playing it from a second. The optimum is the aggression level that maximises the combined result across both attempts, and that optimum lands a long way below a hundred per cent. For most players it sits somewhere in the low to mid sixties, and a player consistently above that is probably leaving points on the table.

The obvious exception is the player whose second serve is a liability. If your second serve is being attacked constantly, the cost of missing the first goes up, and the right response is to serve a safer first ball more often. That is not consistency, it is damage control, and the honest fix is a better second serve rather than a tamer first.

Here is the test I would apply, and it needs nothing more than a notebook. Count the points won on first serves in a set and the points won on second serves. If the gap between those two rates is large, be more aggressive on the first, because every extra one you land is worth a lot. If the gap is small, your first serve is not earning its risk and you should be landing more of them.

That is the calculation, and it is straightforward, and almost no one does it because the percentage is printed on the screen and the derived comparison is not.

There is a scenario where I would take the safe first serve without argument. Second serve at four all in a deciding set, into the wind, with a returner who has been standing three metres back all match. Fine. Land it. Play the point.

But do not make a virtue of it for four sets and then wonder why nobody feels threatened by your service game.