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IPTL 2015 - SINGAPORE, 20 December 2015 (Day 3) IP: 203.116.177.151 Posted on December 20, 2015 at 03:55:37 PM by David Barnes
INTERNATIONAL PREMIER TENNIS LEAGUE (IPTL) - 2015 EDITION
SINGAPORE, 20 December 2015 (DAY 3 – THE FINAL)
The organisers laid on a fabulous display this afternoon, as the great and the good were taking their seats before the tennis action began, from a massed group called ‘Bloco Singapura’. This samba ensemble (also a school) was set up by a local composer and music teacher Syed Ahmad following a visit to Rio de Janeiro in 2008, when he discovered his musical ‘”love of things obscure”, and embraced, as he put it in a recent talk, the indigenous philosophy of ‘Just give me the beach, the girls, and the guitar’. The ensemble numbers around two hundred and fifty – they were all over the court, and up all the aisles as well – and produced a sound of glorious rhythmic intensity that provided the perfect high-octane start of proceedings today.
Syed tells a lovely story of an incident during a show in Singapore, when a resident from an area up the road from the performance, nearly half a mile away, came and asked if the group could “turn the volume down”, because their father was ill at home following a heart attack. Some volume, and it echoed round the stadium this afternoon like rolling thunder on one of the city’s worst rainy season. Syed thinks he kick-started the emergence of Orchard Road as a ‘public space’, since that is where – to the initial consternation of the authorities, who used to turn up within minutes of the show starting to try and close it down – they played most of their gigs initially. His philosophy – “we did a thing of logic, ‘go, go go’” might yet become a leitmotiv for the IPTL.
Anyway, to the tennis. The Singapore Slammers got off to the best possible start, Carlos Moya narrowly beating Fabrice Santoro of the Indian Aces 6-4. The key point came with the Frenchman serving, at 4-5, 15-30 down, when the Slammers played their ‘power point’, which they won, and as the point counted double, Moya won the set 6-4. Inspired stuff, the Slammers taking a leaf out of the ace tactician Santoro’s book with their crucial move.
The next singles match saw a enthralling tussle between the elegantly silent Belinda Bencic for the Slammers and the egregiously grunting Svetlana Kuznetsova for the Aces; the Swiss girl took a commanding 5-0 lead in the shoot-out at 5-5, and won the set a couple of points later with a trademark backhand down the line. She served better than her opponent, had more winners and fewer unforced errors, and deserved the win. The score-line today was much closer than her 6-2 victory yesterday, but the Slammers were on a roll, eyeing the US$1,000,000 team prize with passion.
The Aces fought back and won the mixed doubles 6-2, Rohan Bopanna, partnering Sania Mirza, in classically brilliant form, whistling through the set in 22 minutes, and thus the Slammers led 15-14 at just over the halfway point, with three of the five sets played. Tomic was marginally more fancied in the mens singles, on next, but it was the Swiss who got the break of serve, to lead 5-2. Tomic held serve for 3-5, but Wawrinka served out the set for a 6-3 win, pushing his team into the lead 20-18.
Melo and Wawrinka took a surprise 3-0 lead in the last set of the night, against Bopanna and Dodig; a forehand from Wawrinka, which would have given the Slammers a 4-0 lead, missed the line by millimetres, but they went 4-1 with a classically simple net volley from Melo anyway, showing the crisp doubles play for which he is so famed. The Slammers, leading now 24 to 19, were almost home and dry, went 5-2 (25-20) up, were pegged back to 5-3, but then came a Wawrinka service game. He won it to love, his partner Melo finishing matters off with yet another brilliantly taken net volley, and the championship – and a million bucks - was theirs.
At times it’s a little hard to see what the IPTL brings to the sport other than money for the players and kudos for the backers, but on reflection the format could be said to engage both fans and players to a greater extent than on the regular ATP and WTA tours, and the team concept, combining players from different disciplines and different countries, in a manner obviously not possible in the Davis Cup, seems to be a hit with the participants. Don’t write it off quite yet – or, as the local ‘Straits Times’ put it in a headline relating to the new Star Wars film, ‘May the franchise be with you’.
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David Barnes/Topspin, 2015
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