You all know how much I dislike sports cliches (and cliches in general). I really hate it when people talk about the "intangibles", and when they use the "easy power" cliche and such.
And I really don't like it when they try to make overly complicated explanations. The one I dislike the most is: "S/he played the important points better".
The reality is that that statement is BS. It is a dumb tautology.
We tend to forget that tennis is the ultimate ZERO SUM game; if you win a point, your opponent lost it. It is not like, for example, basketball, where when you shoot a triple, and you don't make it, nothing happens. You opponent does not get points from your mistakes.
I say this. Due to the structure of the game, and the scoring system, even supremely equal players will have scores that are like, well, tennis scores. Assume two players are exactly balanced. What would that mean?
Well, it would not mean an infinite game, lasting forever. One or the other WILL win the match, because even randomly generated scoring produces tennis like scores. Even randomly generated scores produce streaks.
So I made a simulator. It works like this:
ALL points are randomly generated. No bias, no reasoning; this thing is randomly generated, meaning every player has a 50% chance of winning the POINT. And even doing this, the scores generated are EXACTLY like tennis scores. Again, you don't get the infinite game, nor the infinite set. You get sets that are all over the place: 6-2, 6-1, 7-5, etc. If you play it long enough, you will get the odd sets in which the player that LOST won more points.
You can try it here. The set will be played to completion (meaning, NO TB's; that coding would be too much), and you will see all points being played.
So, no. Novak DID NOT play the important points better than Roger at W 2019, and Hana Mandlikova DID NOT play the important points better than Martina in the 1985 USO final and Tracy Austin certainly DID NOT play the important points better than Martina in the 1981 USO final.
It was just that somebody had to win.
SIMULATOR HERE