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BNP PARIBAS MASTERS 2014 - FRIDAY 31 OCTOBER IP: 46.218.233.162 Posted on November 1, 2014 at 02:05:15 AM by David Barnes
BNP PARIBAS MASTERS, PARIS
FRIDAY 31 OCTOBER 2014
The elephant in the press room this week, of course, as in previous weeks on the ATP tour, is the over-large ghost of Neil Harman, due to that great scribe's continued absence from the tennis world of which he has been such an integral - and generally respected - part over the last nearly thirty years. For those of you who may have missed the shenanigans to date, Neil resigned earlier this year from the International Tennis Writers Association (of which he was co-President), was refused accreditation at the US Open and subsequent tournaments and finally relieved of his duties as tennis correspondent at 'The Times', the latter decision being one which he is currently appealing. This all followed Harman's 'outing', largely by Ben Rothenberg, a young American journalist who writes for various outlets, but with a little help from Private Eye, as a serial plagiarist when writing the Wimbledon Official Yearbook for the last few years (2014's has been authored by Paul Newman, and will be available, finally, online via the Wimbledon shop after 10 November).
The affair has set tongues wagging in Press Rooms around the world ever since the story broke back in the spring. Broadly speaking, everybody agrees that what Neil did was wrong, not to say idiotic, but agreement dissolves over whether the subsequent developments represent a vendetta that got out of hand or a perfectly logical and justified example of schadenfreude taking its unhappy course. As one veteran hack said to me, the only difference between Harman's behaviour and that of the sainted John Parsons (who used to write the yearbook) is that the stuff John used to re-hash, even more shamelessly, was his own prose and not that of others. I'm with that longtime tennis sage Richard Evans in ruminating, amid all the brouhaha, on the almost Shakespearian, personal nature of the tragedy for Neil and his family. To quote from Neil's letter to the ITWA, announcing his decision to resign; "There can be no excuse for such shoddy work which I deeply regret. I did it without malice aforethought, but that I did it at all is simply inexcusable. This is a marked stain on my reputation and (I hope) good name. I have allowed my standards to slide, more than is acceptable".
The sliding of standards is, happily, not something that Andy Murray has been familiar with, until today, since he started his extraordinary run of 20 victories in 22 matches six weeks or so ago, gathering titles in Shenzhen, Vienna and Valencia, and around US$1m in prize money, along the way, in his now successful bid to qualify for the London World Tour Finals. He made Grigor Dimitrov look ordinary (if that's not too callous and ignorant a description of the latest of Maria Sharapova's squeezes) yesterday, and today squared up to Novak Djokovic, against whom he has lost more often than he has won since they first began trading passing shots in their first encounter on the ATP tour back in 2006 at the Madrid Masters. Significantly he had won only one (Wimbledon final, 2013) of their last seven matches before today.
The match was almost 'late' getting on court due to the tedious struggle that Tomas Berdych allowed himself to be dragged into with Kevin Anderson, something of another late bloomer this season - the protea of the ATP's botanical garden, in many ways. The Czech, who operates a one man charisma-free zone in the locker room and at press conferences, according to some less charitable members of the those whose job it is to ask questions at the latter, eventually triumphed 6-7, 6-4, 6-4. He may lack charisma, but by golly he has an attractive girlfriend in the lovely Ester, so clearly in this case charisma is in 'the eye of the bimbette'.
Roger Federer disappointed in his match with Milos Raonic, losing 7-6, 7-5 in an hour and a half, never quite reading the Canadian's booming serve; there were 22 aces from Raonic's racket, and his average speed of serve was 218kmh (that's fractionally under 175mph), but he backed up his serve by playing almost exclusively to the Federer backhand, thus scoring any number of cheap points. Raonic still has work to do on his game after serve - his backhand was pretty woeful, even worse than Federer's, which is saying something at this stage in the great man's career, and the Canadian made twenty two unforced errors compared to Federer's thirteen. Sometimes match statistics, like Judy Murray's 'Strictly' costumes, tell only half the story.
Andy Murray v Novak Djokovic was, however, the pick of today's quarterfinals, such is their recent history in head-to-heads, even though Djokovic started the clear favourite with fourteen wins to the Scot's eight stretching back over the years. 'Not before 7.30pm', said the official order of play for the match, and 'Not before 8.30pm' for the fourth quarterfinal which followed it, which was absurdly optimistic given their previous match-ups. The first set alone took over an hour, with plenty of break points (five in the Serb's favour, all of them saved by Murray), until the twelfth game, when a sixth was also a set point, and was converted. This last game of the set, with a double fault from the Scot after a mobile phone went off, and a forehand into the net to concede it, but with some exquisite stroke play in between these lacunae, revealed the best and the worst of the Murray's play. Somebody should really tell Boris Becker to put his phone on silent and keep it there . . .
Things went from bad to worse in the second set for a clearly out-of-sorts Murray; although he broke Djokovic to take a 2-1 lead, he surrendered it immediately, then lost his own serve again at 2-3 to fall further behind. The Serb was proving just too good, the Scot just too fragile and clapped out. Djokovic won a second consecutive service game to love to move to 5-2, then, on serve, Murray pushed a forehand long to surrender a 30-15 lead, struck a forehand into the bottom of the net, and finally another, at 30-40, to concede the match. He walked off court looking as if somebody had emptied the contents of his ice bath over him while he was still in bed asleep, and he had indeed been eagerly somnambulating through the match. Still, at least he can get home tomorrow in time to watch his mother performing on another edition of 'Strictly'. Some guys have all the luck . . .
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David Barnes/Topspin, 2014
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