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ROLAND GARROS 2014 - SATURDAY 31 MAY IP: 46.255.183.159 Posted on June 1, 2014 at 01:53:41 AM by David Barnes
ROLAND GARROS 2014
SATURDAY 31 MAY (DAY 7)
Milos Raonic did particularly well in the gloom yesterday evening to edge past local favourite Gilles Simon in five sets, battling both the Frenchman’s wonderfully fluid, tenacious, stroke-making, and the partisan crowd, whose behaviour, uncomfortably close to loutish, threatened to spoil an enthralling contest. ‘J’abuse, donc je suis’ (to paraphrase Descartes, and with a nod to Emila Zola, who has a Metro stop named after him on the line that runs to the Porte d’Auteuil), might be the best way to describe the unfortunate antics of certain sections of the crowd, in shouting repeatedly as the Canadian prepared to serve. Raonic himself seemed untroubled, and won friends afterwards by replying to Fabrice Santoro’s on-court questioning in French. “I live and die with my serve, so I’d rather be serving for the match than anything else”, he said, ruefully acknowledging that he could have won the match when serving at 5-4, but had to wait until 6-5 to settle matters, 4-6, 6-3, 2-6, 6-2, 7-5 in three hours and a quarter.
The match statistics make for interesting reading; Raonic whammed down 19 aces compared to Simon’s eight, but committed seven double faults to the Frenchman’s two. The Canadian made a gruesome 74 unforced errors to Simon’s 26, but only 38 forced errors compared to 58 from his opponent. Both players won 61% of their own service points.
The young American Jack Sock was feeling the heat this morning, on Court 7, playing the lowly-ranked Dusan Lajovic, whose retinue of supporters on the Player/Press benches were highly vocal. It seems that some Serbian players have a fairly carefree attitude to ‘friends and family’, to judge by the characters who were sporting the much sought-after qualifying wristbands - on their feet between almost every rally, cheering their man in extremis, they at least added colour to the occasion. They were not disappointed either; Sock went two sets down, needed treatment to his right arm at 3-4 down in the third, and didn’t win another game; 6-4, 7-5, 6-3 to the Serb.
Asked afterwards if he knew the rowdy contingent in the stands, Lajovic was at least honest; “No, I met them first time here in my first round, and they have been to every match of mine. In some situations, I would say that they have helped me a lot”. That’s all right then – Serbia, as we know, is really all one big happy family. Court 7 is though a terrific venue for the fans – the seating perilously close to the court on both sides and at one end, the announcements and applause from Suzanne Lenglen clearly audible, while from time to time the musical entertainment just beyond the rear fencing intrudes delightfully.
Suzanne Lenglen court saw two matches of high drama this afternoon and evening; Gael Monfils took 3h 27m to squeeze past the Italian Fabio Fognini, who hails from the commedia dell’ arte school of entertainment, although it was the Frenchman who started playing silly games in the fourth set, when he looked as if he was falling to pieces, but in reality was just “worn out” and, as he claimed afterwards, happy to concede a ‘bagel’ in order to regain some strength for the final set. He rallied in the fifth to win 5-7, 6-2, 6-4, 0-6, 6-2. Much whooping and clapping, cheering and revelry from the packed crowd, a surprising number of whom stayed, after this particularly entertaining warm-up act of an hors d-oeuvre, for the Andy Murray main course.
Murray was up against the wily Philipp Kohlschreiber; after 3h 24m, it being 9.39pm and almost dark, the match was suspended due to bad light at two sets all, 7-7 in the fifth. If that suggests an anodyne slugfest between two baseline contestants, little could be further from the truth. Murray led 3-1 in the first set and lost it 6-3, led by the same margin (after 3-0) in the fourth and lost it 6-4, while bagging each of the intervening sets 6-3. The match had 17 breaks of serve, five of them in the fourth set and four of them in the unfinished fifth.
Murray appeared truculent and moody from the start, talking to himself and his camp with the expletive-laden Celtic phraseology for which he is so infamous, and his performance was quite the curate’s egg of an affair that we have come to expect from him over the years, in the middle stages of a Grand Slam. There were moments of sheer poetry, and his first serve was often a thing of exquisitely placed and explosive beauty. There were also periods of stodgy, prosaic, error-strewn tennis that would have embarrassed competitors on the Challenger circuit.
Kohlschreiber has a wonderful backhand, which he unfurled at regular intervals, like the many German flags that appeared in the stand behind the umpire’s chair, and he used it as often as he could to inflict serious damage to Murray’s physique, as well as to his psyche. The Scot seemed to be clutching his left hamstring early in the first set, but it wasn’t till the fifth that he called for the trainer, who ran on and massaged . . . his right quad. It was ever thus on the ATP Tour, and the sooner they make some changes to the rules which allow for the nonsense of ‘medical time-outs’ which are often anything but, the better, in the view of many. Murray, it must be said, is not usually one of the worst offenders in this acting category.
Play will resume tomorrow, second on court, assuming that Murray spends long enough in his ice bath tonight to recover from whatever was really bothering him during the match.
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David Barnes/Topspin, 2014
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