Paris: About time too.

 

So it’s like this. Paree and me? We go waaaayyyyy back. But it’s also what they call “complicated”.

 

The top players (those that have qualified for WTF in particular) haven’t always shown up. Those that have are almost always too banged up to care.

 

The venue is a study in criminally bland interiors - the outside courts look like something they’ve annexed from the local primary school – the main court is certainly big, yet still lacks the spunk expected of (what to most is) a season ending event, occupying instead a no-man’s-land of confused obsolescence: too cluttered to be minimalist yet too vacant to have anything like an atmosphere.

 

Is it any wonder the stands are barely filled until well into round three (and even then it’s only for marquee matches)?

 

The trouble is, it’s also the place Marat won three of his five Masters titles and the site of Daveed Nalbandian’s little late season surge of 07 – ideologically speaking, I have a hard time even feigning indifference to any of that.

 

Then there’s the crowd…its one thing seeing an outside court full of empty people, but that’s not half as jarring as those that eventually do turn up:  French fans that don’t boo and hiss and poke and leer and….flap(?) Or is that just for RG?

Like I said. Complicated.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What took you so long?

 

You might expect me to be jumping clean out of my boxer shorts over this one, and I am, except….it should have happened one whole year ago.

 

With it being Paree, and with the show both Llodra and Monfils had put on for the better part of the week, there was a certain tricoloured electricity in the air – and, consequently, much of the pre-final commentary had centred along the lines of…. “Has Gael come of age?” …. “Will Sod be affected by the Parisian crowd?” … “Has Rasheed finally pushed the right buttons?”.

 

I see no problem with any of that. Trouble is, it diverted attention from that bloated, frisky, Scandinavian elephant on the other side of the room: that it’s more than just a little anomalous for a guy with GS wins over the best two players of the past decade (one of which arguably ranks as the greatest sporting upset of recent years) not to have won a single Masters event – not even on a fast indoor court.

 

 

 

So when Sod finally put paid to Gael’s last (and obviously doomed) attempts at treating the rising damp of French melancholy, it was all a little ‘are you not done yet?’ (and not just because the final was such a blowout).

 

The greater and more obvious moral victory was against Mika in the semis who despite having spawned a blister and very evidently tiring in the final set, remained, for me, the better player out there for most of the match week.

 

So when Amelie, Fabrice, Guy, Julien and, quite possibly, the spirit of de Gaulle all showed up courtside at the same time – for the briefest of moments, it really did seem the week was destined to end on that flavoursome, tricoloured note.

 

A lesser player (or a pre 2009 Sod for that matter), effectively being prevented from playing their best tennis, would have crumpled in a self-effacing heap of hopeless obsolescence .

 

 

And yet, the truth is no one, not even Napoleon himself, could have enabled Gael to beat Sod on a court as fast as this.

 

Swedes win on fast indoor courts. That’s just the natural order of things dear boy. Why should it matter in 2010 that he’s (clearly) not cut from the same cloth as Edberg or Wilander?

 

Robin’s groundies on the fastest court we’ve seen this season? Well that’s just a marriage made in heaven.

 

We hold these truths to be self evident because…well, mainly because Robin’s oppressive groundies say they are – truths that should, in any case, by now have been drummed into us by the violence of his, otherwise well-meaning, forehand – a forehand only a mother (and a certain doting tennis blogger) could love.

 

 

Expecting him to S+V or otherwise cavort with the net the way Edberg did is like attending a Burlesque show and complaining about the overdressed, hammy actors.

 

And with that, Sod – sorry Söd – usurps Muzz as the #4 ranked player in the world. With less than 300 points between him and Djoko and virtually no points to defend in Melbourne (both have 400 points to defend at WTF) , the future’s looking very bright indeed.

 

It’s a career milestone….and yet it’s also just another box to be ticked along the way to bigger and better things. He’d completed all the the other rites of passage and, if you ask me, reaching two Slam finals in the manner he did has got to be worth a Masters title alone.

 

Do I think he needed to win a Masters title before a Slam, something of a diktat amongst tennis’s chattering classes? ‘fraid not – if anything, he seems more akin to Delpo in the way he simply ‘arrives’, should he decide to play well enough to win a Slam or any other event.

 

This one was long overdue….and it’s only the beginning.

 

In yer MonFACE

 

So sad Gaël. Here, have a Germanic umlaut for your pain.

 

Decriers will, of course (correctly) point to that poor excuse for a final – and yet, did any one of us believe they’d live to see the day Gael pulled the plug on that tired, poorly-choreographed stuntman act that riles me, and countless others, so very much?

 

 

No amateur dramatics, no Car-Crash TV – in fact, no broken glass of any kind.

 

It meant he was able to go through three top ten players (and score his first win over Fed) in the same week – don’t be surprised not to see that again for a very long time.

 

There was always a very real danger that, having delivered such an extraordinary performance piece, Gael would ‘revert to type’ in the final  – no surprises there then. Only, playing brain-dead passive tennis (which there was plenty of), is, this time, only in part responsible.

 

“Since the beginning of the tournament I’ve been really using up my reserves physically and mentally,” said Monfils, who also beat Andy Murray and Fernando Verdasco in earlier rounds. “It’s the whole week that made me tired.

“Today I wasn’t able to find the extra stamina that I would have needed to be more competitive. … It’s the first time I’ve been beating three top-10 players in the same tournament.”

 

Dya know, I actually believe the man?

 

Gael’s not accustomed to the kind of mental/physical demands that such a restrained, patient and focussed passage of successful play at the highest of levels inevitably brings – his character’s usually killed off early on the second act and so has never been part of such a structured narrative, certainly not in such a prominent role.

 

Should it surprise us he wasn’t able to cope? He wouldn’t be the first player to default to more comfy territory under pressure.

 

Except the trouble with reverting to type ‘A’ Gael is that it’s the exact ideological opposite of what you’d normally do in such circumstances: when you’re running so low on fuel, the sensible, considered goto-play is to serve big and to shorten points – arguably what got him there in the first place.

 

But then nothing Gael ever did was either ‘sensible’ or ‘considered’.

 

 

If it were up to me, this entire post would be dedicated to Michael Llodra – my player of the week.

 

Having him win this event would have been exactly the kind of madcap, kooky yet-strangely-appropriate result this tournament’s become known for.

 

For what I hope are very obvious reasons I wasn’t rooting for him…..and yet as I sat there watching him arabesque from one end of the court to the other, it was impossible not to be utterly entranced.

 

A curious, throbbing, elemental mix of idiosyncratic French flair and Moulin Rouge.

 

 

There’ve been all the usual pitiful, nostalgic comparisons to the idealised age that never-was – and yet what’s made this little window into 1996 possible has been the choice of surface – the fastest we’ve seen anywhere all season.

 

Of course it has its drawbacks – there was a reason they slowed down both the grass and the balls at Wimbledon. All the same, I’m thinking it’s pretty obvious the pendulum’s swung too far the other way when one, admittedly superfast, event upends some of the best players of this generation.

 

I’m also thinking it’s a small price to pay for a slightly different look to the type of tennis we get on one awful, anodyne medium-pace, blue hard court after another.

Ready….Set….Withdraw!

 

 

 

 

PARIS (AP) - Top-ranked Rafael Nadal has withdrawn from the Paris Masters for medical reasons.

Tournament director Jean-Francois Caujolle said Friday he did not know the exact nature of Nadal's ailment. The ATP tour said Nadal would discuss the reasons for his withdrawal at a news conference in Paris on Sunday or Monday.

The Spanish player recently said he was feeling fatigue after a successful season in which he won the French Open, Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Nadal has not played since a third-round defeat to Jurgen Melzer at the Shanghai Masters on Oct 14.

With Nadal's withdrawal, Roger Federer has the No. 1 seed and will start against the winner between Nicolas Mahut and Richard Gasquet. The tournament begins Sunday.

 

 

I’m assuming this is, indeed, ‘fatigue’ though we’ll only know for sure after his presser next week.

 

Are those Southeast Asian chickens now coming home to roost?

 

Or is it a more random niggle? Might it even be precautionary?

 

Is he saving himself for London WTF – the only high-end title he’s not won?

 

Is that even allowed?

 

And what, incidentally, is the correct protocol under such circumstances?

 

Can a blog post be entirely composed of questions?

 

Would it be wrong of me to try?

 

You have to think Rafa would need a sick note to pull out of a Masters 1000 event, no?

 

(Did that last question actually qualify as question? Or was it a fudge?)

 

Can fatigue even be diagnosed in the conventional sense?

 

Was playing both Bangkok and Tokyo going into Shanghai a mistake?

 

Are cumulative, delayed effects indeed the bitch everyone says they are?

 

Was I right or was I right?

 

How do you say ‘yes’ and still make it seem like a question?

 

Are you still listening?

 

Why?

Paris: Novak Repackaged, Not Reborn

Djokovic d. Monfils 6-2 5-7 7-6 (3)

For a set and a half yesterday Novak Djokovic played the kind of flawless tennis that made you think it was 2007 all over again.

It all looked very grand indeed.

Only twenty four hours earlier Novak had dusted off Nadal using the same blend of unrestrained flamboyance, and precision guided play, not seen from him for well over 18 months.

(Photo: Clive Rose/Getty Images)

Gael, for all his flamboyant bravado, looked like a school kid well and truly out of his depth, on his way to being comprehensively stripped and gutted before being hurled on to a heap in some remote landfill site.

Then something happened.

The paint stripper stopped working. The jackhammer seized up.

Mostly it was about everything misfiring, all at once.

I was worried ‘Grinderman’ was about to resurface – that at least would have meant he would more than likely have kept his cool to put Gael away in two -- but this was more serious than that.

We’d seen this Jekyll and Hyde act at various points thr0ughout the year, so the sight of Djoko unable to keep the ball in play, perhaps shouldn’t be that astonishing. Think back carefully and you’ll remember it happened this very week, in that second set he played against Big Rob.

Which is why I feel it’s all very premature to read too much into his recent wins over Messrs Fed and Nadal, and that many journos are rather overreaching themselves in their desperate attempts at recasting him as ‘The One Reborn’.

It's not just that Nadal's own shadow would likely take offence at being made an exemplification for his shoddy form (though I'm actually sorta glad its a dip and not a bad knee that’s at the root of the problem).

Or that this weekend's result might readily have been so very different had Federer not run into an impromptu demonstration of French Tennis, the way it should be played.

The real reason I'm having diffculty buying into the concept of 'Novak - Reborn', is that this is not so much a return to his old form as it is a carefully managed optimisation of a different brand of tennis. A game that's had commentators perplexed since he switched frames at the beginning of the year, with it's uncharacteristic and bizarre forays into grinderman territory.

Don't worry, I'm not going down that road again. My point is that, whilst I'm glad Novak has managed to optimise his play into something more in line with his standing in the game, it's not what led him to winning a Slam.

He may reach those less manufactured heights again with further successive optimisations and, I hope, a gradual curbing of that grind I once found so offensive, but which has now given way to a kind of unapologetic indifference. But until then, let's just say the occasional shocker wouldn't shock me.

That said, Djoko deserves all the plaudits he’s been receiving these past two weeks for being one of the few players seemingly fit enough and committed enough to make something of the remaining few weeks of the calendar: there’s still tennis to be played whatever you might think of the post-USO variety.

What’s more is he’s deserving of a Masters 1000 title - maybe even on the back of that astonishing Madrid semi-final alone.

Maybe it's that sense of vindication that was behind that wolverine-like transformation that unfurled during the spectacle that was his victory celebration. It reminded me of those Maori-inspired Hakka Dances the New Zealand All Blacks perform before going into 'battle'. Try and picture this happening during a Serbian-American Davis Cup tie involving Djoko facing off with A-Rod.

Ok, maybe don’t picture it happening.

I don’t really know what to say about Gael, other than that he served exceedingly well. I don’t like the way he lurks behind the baseline. Never have, never will; and I despise his loopy defensive shots that barely clear the service line and, as far as I'm concerned, have no business being a part of the modern game (wouldn’t it be easier to play the match with the words ‘sitting duck’ emblazoned on your chest?).

(Photo: AP)

But he did well to keep his cool (if you can call it that) when Djoko’s forehand went so awry during that second set, thereby forcing a third, and for that I guess he deserves some credit. It was certainly well received by the Parisian crowd.

I’m just not convinced this experience was anywhere near as life-changing or career-transforming as it might have been.

Why does that not surprise me?

A Blow for the Little Man…

Julian Benneteau has just played the match of his life, knocking out Roger Federer in three sets, in his opening match.

(Photo: Clive Rose/Getty Images)

The funny thing is it’s difficult to see what Federer did wrong. If anything. He’s cruised through similar stages in the past playing only fractionally as well.

Today, he hit fifteen aces, hit more winners than Benneteau and served in the 70s. That’d be percentages, not the era of disco jingles.

He could maybe have thrown in a few more tactical lobs to Julian’s rabid net rushes, and I’m sure we’ll hear that rust had something to do with this.

But every once in a while someone succeeds in landing a blow for the little man. You'll pardon me if I take a moment to celebrate that (no offence Fed Fans); whether he was bolstered by the Parisian crowd or not, Julian will likely treasure this one for years.

(Photo: AP)

Now watch him go out in the very next round.

Roger will feel this one keenly too I believe; his second consecutive loss remember, and something of a knock to his campaign to end the season as world #1.

I still think he’ll keep a hold on to it however.

It would be more worrying had he lost due the errant play we saw so much of earlier on this year. Today he appeared confident and secure as ever; and if you contrast that with the horror of a match Nadal played today, you'll likely understand why I believe Rafa will need to pull out all the stops (and then some) to get anywhere near to staking a claim for the top spot.

Rafa got through alright. But only just, and he was considerably aided by Almagro in the later stages of this sorry mess; besides, rank amateurs get through, park players get through. Heck, I even get through sometimes.

Most troubling of all was the way he let rallies lengthen and play out unnecessarily in the most unRafa-like way imaginable; at times, it almost had the feel of an exhibition match, with the way in which each ball was fed systematically back to Almagro, who possessed neither the will nor the might to put it away.

A confusing, convulsing bloodied pulp of a mess.

I know it’s not always that Rafa does well here, but we’ve usually season ending injuries to thank for that.