"He's going to make an effort to come back" says Tommy Haas on Roger Federer

Roger Federer is currently recovering from a knee surgery that will leave him sidelined for many more months. Federer was last pictured a few weeks ago at the Paris Fashion Week walking with crutches showing that his eventual return to tennis is still far away. He will certainly miss the Australian Open but none of that is making former pro Tommy Haas believe that he won't succeed.

Speaking on his former colleague Haas said:

“We saw at Wimbledon that he was a little bit injured, he wasn’t moving as well as usual. But he’s going to make every effort to come back. I’m 100 per cent sure that the goal is Wimbledon. It’s his best surface to go far again.”

Haas, a former Wimbledon semifinalist as well knows how deadly Federer can be on the grass even at this advanced age. Haas believes a key component of the successful recovery will be his love for life and a deep hunger to succeed:

“He’s happy. He has no reason not to be. He knows that, there’s a lot of gratitude in him. He loves life. But he’s still hungry. He still hopes he can come back. He wants to stop when he wants to, to decide when it’s time to say you don’t like it anymore (because) you lose too much.”

Asked when he sees Federer come back Haas took a guess:

“It’s all going to depend on how he (Roger Federer) can overcome that (knee surgery) physically. We’ll have an element of an answer in March, April, May.”