The Australian formation: why it wins and when to use it

Doubles is a geometry game. The Australian formation is the one time in a match when a serving team deliberately breaks that geometry, and the reason to know about it is that when it works, it wins the point before the ball has been struck.

Most club doubles players never use the Australian formation. Most club doubles players also concede a stream of cross-court winners on the ad side and never work out why. Those two facts are related. This piece is what the Australian formation actually is, why it works, when to use it, and which pros built their careers on it.

What the formation actually is

In standard doubles formation, the server stands on one side of the centre mark on the baseline, and the server's partner stands at the net on the opposite side. The court is split down the middle. Each player covers their own half.

In the Australian formation, both players on the serving team stand on the same side of the centre mark. The server is closer to the T than usual; the net player stands directly ahead of the server, on the same side of the court as the server. If the server is serving from the deuce side, both players are on the deuce side; if serving from the ad side, both players are on the ad side. The far half of the court, the returner's diagonal, is left open.

That open half is not an accident. It is the trade the formation is making. See our companion piece on doubles positioning: where you should actually be standing for the baseline geometry the Australian formation is deliberately breaking.

Why it wins

The Australian formation works because the highest-percentage return in doubles is a cross-court angle. Returners rehearse it, coaches drill it, and most players' best return of serve is a cross-court forehand or backhand that ends near the sideline in the server's half of the court. The standard formation exists in part to receive that return.

The Australian formation takes away that return, because there is now a net player already standing in the cross-court lane. The returner has three options. They can hit their rehearsed cross-court return, straight at the waiting net player, which almost always ends the point in the serving team's favour. They can hit down the line into the open half of the court, which is a lower-percentage shot they have practised less. Or they can lob.

All three options are worse for the returner than what they would have hit in standard formation. That is the point. You have not built a wall; you have moved the returner from their comfortable shot to a shot they are less confident with. The Australian formation is a probability tax on the return of serve.

When to use it

Three scenarios are the classic uses:

The returner is picking your ad-side backhand cross-court. The most common use. When serving from the ad side to a right-hander (or from the deuce side to a left-hander), the natural cross-court return goes to the server's backhand, and if the returner is confident there, the serving team bleeds points. The Australian formation forces the returner to hit down the line to the server's forehand instead. If the server has a stronger forehand than backhand (most players do), this is a straight tactical win.

Big points on the ad side. Break points, game points, and the deuce sequence are all served from the ad side. If the ad-side pattern has been breaking down for the serving team, switching to the Australian on 40-30 or ad-out is a legitimate momentum reset. Even if the return still comes back, the disruption to the returner's rhythm alone is often worth it.

To set up an active poach. The Australian net player is already on the returner's stronger diagonal, meaning any weak return that does come back is a routine poach into the open court. If your partner is aggressive at the net and the returner is under pressure, this is where cheap points come from.

Where to serve when you play it

The Australian formation is only as good as the serve that follows it. Three placements work.

Into the body. The returner cannot swing freely on a body serve. In the Australian formation this matters more than usual, because the returner is already thinking about where to redirect the ball. A jammed return is almost always a floater, which is exactly what the net player is standing there to punish.

Wide to the backhand. This forces the returner to change the direction of the ball to hit down the line, which is technically harder than it sounds. Changing direction on a wide, low-bouncing serve produces most of the errors and short returns that the Australian formation is designed to feed on.

Down the T with depth. Less common but effective if the returner has cheated toward the alley in anticipation of the wide serve. The T serve into the Australian keeps the returner honest and prevents them from over-committing to the down-the-line return option.

What does not work: any serve that lets the returner hit a comfortable cross-court winner into the alley the formation has left open. Slow second serves, misplaced first serves, and anything that sits up in the strike zone all invite the returner to hit the shot the formation is meant to prevent. The formation punishes bad serves harder than standard formation does.

The pros who built the tactic

The Australian formation is named after the Australian Davis Cup teams of the 1960s and 1970s, and specifically after the pairings of John Newcombe and Tony Roche, who used it as a signature disruption tactic in an era when it was almost unknown at the top of the game. Newcombe's booming serve was well suited to the pattern; Roche's net play converted the resulting weak returns into finished points. The formation followed the players out of Davis Cup and into the professional doubles game.

The most decorated modern users were Bob and Mike Bryan, the American twins who ended their careers with sixteen Grand Slam doubles titles and made the Australian and its close cousin the I-formation a routine part of their pattern. The Bryan brothers used the formation as a change-up on ad-side break points and as an opener at the start of return games; the effect on opposing returners was measurable, and their record on ad-side big points was among the best in the history of professional doubles.

At the current top of the game the formation is standard-issue for every elite doubles pair. Modern British pros including Neal Skupski, whose interview we published previously, use it situationally throughout matches, particularly against known cross-court returners and on the big points that come off the ad side. What has changed at the pro level is not whether the formation is used, but how often; modern doubles pairs shift in and out of Australian, I-formation, and standard on a point-by-point basis, chosen from the bench based on scouting reports on the return patterns of the opposition.

How to defend against it, if the other team beats you to it

Two responses work when the opposing team switches to Australian on you.

Run around your backhand. If the serve is coming to your backhand in the ad court and the formation is inviting you to hit down the line, the counter-move is often to step around the serve and hit a forehand into the open cross-court that the net player has vacated. This requires you to have both the footwork to do it and a forehand that can hit through the pace of the serve. It also requires the return to be softer than a genuine first serve; against a heavy first serve you will not have time.

Lob. A deep lob to the far corner on the ad side forces the net player back and resets the formation to something closer to standard. The lob does not have to be a winner; it just has to be deep enough that the net player cannot volley it. Once the point returns to a baseline rally, the geometric disruption of the Australian is gone.

What does not work: forcing the down-the-line return into the open court when you have not practised it. That is the shot the formation is asking you to hit, and the serving team is calibrated for the errors and short returns that inexperienced down-the-line returners produce. If your down-the-line return is not a shot you have hit thousands of times, the safer play is the lob.

When not to use it

The Australian formation is not a universal answer. Three situations where it is wrong:

When your serve is not accurate enough. The formation depends on the serve placement described above. If your first-serve percentage is below fifty and your second serve sits up, using the Australian just gives the returner a bigger open court to attack. Fix the serve first.

When the returner is a strong down-the-line returner. Some returners actually prefer to hit down the line and will happily punish an Australian formation with sharp winners into the open court. Scout the returner. If they are hitting confident down-the-line returns in the early games, the formation is not the answer.

When the opposing net player is aggressive on the poach. The Australian slightly widens the target lane for a poach from the opposing net player on returns that do come back into your open court. If the opposing net player is picking off returns aggressively already, the formation feeds them.

The general rule is: use the Australian formation to solve a specific problem, not as a default. It is a change-up, not a system.

Before you try it in a match

If you would like a properly rated read on your own doubles game before you start experimenting with formations under pressure, All Court exists for exactly that. You put your phone against the back fence, film a session, and upload it. You get a "talking head" session inside your own video from a touring professional. Plus the AI-enabled platform compares those ratings against thousands of shots from hundreds of players graded by the same touring pros and elite coaches. The output is a personalised coaching session on your footage and an All Court Rating for each shot you hit and a cumulative All Court Rating that compounds every time you film more of your play, so that you can see which parts of your doubles game will actually benefit from a tactical change and which parts need attention first. There is no nominator, no joining fee, and no waitlist that closes inside a generation. Join the waitlist at allcourt.club/join.

Related reading

• Doubles positioning: where you should actually be standing, the baseline geometry the Australian formation is deliberately breaking.

• World doubles No.1 Neal Skupski speaks exclusively to All Court Tennis Club, the elite British doubles pro on his approach to the modern game.

• The rally pattern most amateur players never notice, the tactical thinking that separates the club-level doubles player from the one who wins the important points.