The second serve is the most timid shot in tennis and it should not be

Players hit a safe second ball to avoid a double fault and then lose the point anyway, which is a strange bargain to keep making.

A double fault is loud. It feels like a gift, it gets groans from the crowd, and it lodges in the memory in a way that losing a twelve-shot rally after a soft second serve does not. That asymmetry of feeling, not any analysis, is why most players hit their second serve far slower than they should.

Run the logic. If your second serve is safe enough that you almost never miss it, you are also handing the returner a ball they can attack from inside the baseline, and your win rate on those points collapses toward something like a coin flip or worse. If you hit it substantially harder, you will double fault more, and each of those costs you a whole point immediately. The question is only whether the extra points won on the improved serves outnumber the points thrown away on the extra faults.

For a lot of players, on a lot of surfaces, the arithmetic says be braver. Not maximum first-serve pace, obviously. But the gap between first and second serve speed on the professional tours is large, and the return points won behind a floaty second ball are dismal enough that the current setting looks like risk aversion rather than optimisation.

The kick serve muddies this and is worth separating out. A heavy kick is not a slow serve, it is a serve trading speed for bounce, and against a returner who cannot handle a ball above shoulder height it is a genuine weapon rather than a concession. What I object to is not spin. It is pace-free, spin-free, dead-centre second serves hit at half speed because the server is frightened.

There is a strategic version too. Second serve direction is enormously predictable, and any decent scouting operation knows which corner a given player goes to on break point, because under pressure people revert to the pattern they trust. Varying it costs nothing and almost nobody does it.

The players who have understood this tend to be the ones with nothing to lose: a qualifier facing a top seed, hitting second serves at ninety per cent because a normal second serve gets him beaten anyway.

He is not being reckless. He is the only person on the court doing the sums honestly.