Angle is made before contact, not at it

Players chase sharper angles by opening the racket face when the real source of angle is where their feet were a second earlier.

The instinct when you want more angle is to do something with the hand. Roll the wrist, open the face, brush across the outside of the ball. It works a little and it costs a lot, because every degree you add that way comes with a loss of control that shows up on the shots where you did not intend an angle at all.

The bigger lever is contact point, and contact point is a function of the feet. If you take the ball a foot further in front and a foot further to the side, the same swing produces a materially wider ball with no change to the face at all. That is why the players who hit the sharpest cross court forehands look like they are not doing anything unusual with the racket. They are not. They arrived earlier and further across, and the geometry did the work.

There is a corollary that I think is underappreciated. Angle and height trade against each other in a way that decides whether the shot is actually useful. A steep cross court that lands short and low pulls the opponent wide but gives them a comfortable ball to redirect. The same angle hit with more net clearance and more spin lands in a similar place but bounces up around the shoulder, and now the redirect is genuinely hard. Same angle on the diagram, completely different point.

Which is why I am unconvinced by the fashion for measuring shot direction in isolation. A map of where balls land tells you the intent. It does not tell you what the opponent could do with the ball once it got there, and that is the only part that matters.

The other place this shows up is the return. Returners who try to manufacture angle off a heavy serve are usually late, and late plus open face equals a floating ball into the middle of the court. Better to take it flat and deep and accept that this particular ball does not have an angle in it. Not every shot does.

Angles are not a shot type. They are a position you either got to or did not.

Everything after that is just the racket obeying.