When the article was written Federer had lost to Djokovic after having 2 match points on two seperate occsasions (US Open 2010 and 2011) and since then this has happened again at Wimbledon 2019. In that last two matches Federer was serving as well. It's hard to make the argument that this isn't psychological.

If we model tennis points as random (let's say, accounting only for service), would we not expect people to occasionally lose when they had a match point? We'd expect this to happen more often when playing an opponent of comparable skill.

It's not obvious to me that it's psychological at all, and it seems to me that it's only reported as such because it makes a good news story.

Yes, of course it's going to happen. The point is that it there is a significant difference between the players.

Here are some stats on this (collected by other people):

https://www.reddit.com/r/tennis/comments/habvu8/big_3_matche...

https://www.quora.com/How-often-has-Nadal-lost-after-holding...

https://tt.tennis-warehouse.com/index.php?threads%2Fmatch-po...

According the most recent of these threads Federer's lose-after-match-point percentage is 1.4%. Djokovic's is 0.2%. Djokovic also has a much higher win-after-facing-match-point percentage. It's hard to claim that this is purely due to randomness.

I don't find this super convincing.

If you want to convince yourself that choking is a thing, then this is a stat you might look at.

But, this stat is just as likely to be more influenced by how close your opponent's skill was on that day (how often you play opponents at a similar skill level), your and your opponent's relative stamina, whether those match points appeared in a regular service game or a tiebreak (how often your style of play goes to a tiebreak), and perhaps even pure luck - out of thousands of tour players, some are going to have incredible luck.

djokovic was already an extremely strong (mentally, physically, and technically) player himself at that time. he finished the 2011 season no. 1 IIRC.

the "mental toughness" argument cuts both ways. pulling out a win after two match points in a grand slam speaks as much to djokovic's own mental fortitude as it does to federer's lack thereof.

To elaborate beyond what @soneca said, how do we know that Federer lost those points because he thought too much? What if, instead, Federer didn’t think enough, and Djokovic just outthought him? That’s why the conclusion is unfalsifiable.

Yes, I can agree with that. We don't really know enough about what's happening in their heads to make any conclusions.

For me is veeery easy to make the argument that this isn’t psychological, but only to the expected variance of tennis match results. It was you that had to carefully cherry-pick data to support your conclusion.

I would only have to choose among all the other match points he has won through the 20 grand slams he has won. Only considering Federer vs Djoko, Federer won 46% of the matches. There a lot of match points won there. Also, considering only Grand Slams, Federer won 6 out of 17. Not a great record, but still no negligible number of wins. And I would attribute that bad performance more to Djoko skills, and maybe also Djoko physical peak coinciding with Federer older age, than to any thing psychological.

I sometimes find word choice to be a reliable heuristic for evaluating the probable worth of some prose, but I don't see why, in this case, you feel this way. Would you mind elaborating? (Assuming your conclusion is indeed based on the phrasing chosen...)

I start from the assumption that Federer’s career (even in 2012) is enough to prove that he has the mental strength and can perform at the highest level in stressful championship decisions.

But the stronger reason to stop reading is that, in the most generous interpretation, the author started to argue the benefits of “not thinking too much” by using a unfalsifiable claim about a very subjective interpretation of a fact, attributing causality to an anedocte that is far too complex to be resumed into a simplistic reason based on the author’s assumption. This seemed ridiculous to me.

It was obvious to me that the author didn’t have much of a science-informed take (my impression form the title) and was just doing unsubstantiated storytelling

Perhaps OP meant that he had been dealing with a knee injury, and that doesn't have much to do with "mental frailty" at all: https://www.espn.com/tennis/story/_/id/30821027/roger-federe...

EDIT: Actually the article is from 2012, so I assume its because many of Federer's best years were still ahead of him.

The original article (from The Economist) is from 2012, so whatever the author was referring to was not the same as the injuries discussed in your 2021 article (from ESPN).

Hence the edit.

Which was made after my comment.

I think there was some page-refreshing asynchrony here, either on your end or mine. But I appreciate that you attempted to correct me, so thank you.