Yeah what the hell was going on there? Both players complained about getting heckeled by opposing ‘benches’…(mabye Marley23 knows)
Just quoting my post for the beginning of a new page and so eenerms post has a little more context.
Ta:)
The answer wound up being no, but it took five sets. Fish deserves a lot of credit for his revival the last couple of seasons, but Tsonga is more talented.
Schiavone lost to Pavlyuchenkova, who moves on to play Serena. I figure she’ll lose, but I pity the trophy engravers if she ever wins a major. Meanwhile Wozniacki is serving for the second set against Kuznetsova. Kuznetsova won the first set and was up a break for most of the second, but Wozniacki may be fighting her way back into the match. Kuznetsova is so inconsistent - I think she’s near the top five in terms of talent but she’s the 18th seed. Good match, anyway.
Our day the open didn’t go quite as I scheduled it because Armstrong was packed all day, but we saw a lot of good doubles. We started with a mixed match on court 11 and found that Lucie Hradecka has a very powerful serve. She got up to almost 120 mph on a couple of them. Then we went to the Grandstand and watched most of Dulko/Pennetta vs. Errani/Vinci. Dulko and Pennetta were the better team, but they lost momentum late in the second set and wound up losing the match. Then we checked out the new court 17 for part of Fyrstenberg/Matkowski vs. Delgado/Marray. Matkowski’s service motion is not to be missed. He looks like he’s going to corkscrew himself into the ground, and then he just bombs away. He was getting into the 130s regularly and hit 140 on a fault. In the future if I go to during the second week I might get a ticket to Ashe or Armstrong instead of trying to get in general admission, but we got a very nice sampler of tennis. My girlfriend is looking forward to next year already.
Federer/Monaco match starts at 11:50 pm NYC time. Long night for volunteers, umpires, linepeople ballboys, ballgirls, concessionaires, spectators, and…players. And the place looks packed!
Somebody tell Monaco the match has started.
First set to Federer, 6-1, in a very brisk 19 minutes. Federer had ten winners and three errors, and Monaco had one winner and nine errors.
Federer cruised through Monaco.
I’m in schock that Wozniacki came back to beat Kuznetsova. Svetlana has a great game, but my goodness she’s a head case. I really do wonder if she has any strategy going into a match because she plays the same no matter who she plays. Wozniacki loves pace because she just has to bunt it back while her opponent wears herself out trying to kill the ball. As Evert said, why not drop shot her? Why not try short angles? ANYTHING but creaming the ball, which Wozniacki excels at defending.
I’m afraid the rain is on its way right when the tournament is heating up.
Yeah, it sure is. We actually cut out a little early yesterday because it looked like it was going to rain, although obviously it did not. It’s been overcast since then. I was pretty impressed by Wozniacki, too. She pointed out that she pulled off a similar comeback against Kuznetsova two years ago when she made it all the way to the finals. She could still stand to add a lot more offense to help get her from the fourth round of majors into the semis and finals, but she pulled it off this time. And yes, Kuznetsova is as baffling as ever. She’s won two majors but still gets overlooked because of things like this.
That Federer-Monaco match was about as lopsided a match as you’re ever going to see between two guys in the fourth round of a major. It’s the kind of result you saw from Federer a couple of years ago, partly because he was really on and partly because Monaco was pretty awful. The whole thing took an hour and 25 minutes. Federer hit 42 winners (14 aces) and 21 errors and Monaco hit 4 winners with 23 errors. I hope they get to play today, although it sets up an interesting finish if they don’t. And I’m sure Federer sees a rain delay for his opponents as a potential tactical advantage. But first he has to get through Tsonga. (Djokovic plays Tipsarevic.)
The men’s matches today are supposed to be:
Isner (28) vs. Simon (12)
Young vs. Murray (4)
Ferrer (5) vs. Roddick (21)
Muller vs. Nadal (2)
And today’s women’s quarters would be:
Kerber vs. Pennetta (26)
Stosur (9) vs. Zvonareva (2)
All the matches scheduled for today have been postponed until tomorrow. Sucks for today, but if the weather holds out tomorrow, that should make for a great day of tennis with all the men’s and women’s quarterfinals.
What?! What am I going to do the rest of the evening?
::grumble, grumble, grumble::
I think the traditional activity during rain delays is to watch Jimmy Connors’s run to the semifinals in 1991.
Lamentably, Connors isn’t cute. During Wimbledon rain outs, I at least get to revisit my youth and watch my man, Borg, v. McEnroe in their itty bitty shorts.
They still haven’t started today because the rain is continuing, on and off. If anyone is wondering about the subject of a roof, Sports Illustrated writer Jon Wertheim addressed it yesterday. He said Ashe stadium is so large that a roof is probably structurally impossible, and it’s unsafe to build on Armstrong or the Grandstand because they are build over soft ground. In fact I read - either on the SDMB or SI - that those stadiums may need to be replaced in the near future because of that instability. So for now, you can expect more of Connors vs. Krickstein (or Agassi-Blake or whatever newer match they show).
They managed to rush in a couple of games in a few matches today - Gilles Simon is up 3-0 on Nadal - but that was about it. Play was almost entirely washed out. They say they’re going to try to get through some matches tonight, but I’ve read the forecast for tonight calls for a 100 percent chance of rain.
Hey, they’re playing tennis!
Nadal is certainly whomping up on Muller. Has Nadal ever come back from a rain delay and not played great tennis?
I don’t want to jinx anything, but Roddick seems to be doing well too.
Stosur just beat Zvonareva 3 & 3. That has to be her biggest win since she reached the French Open final last year. Serena is now up a set and a break on Pavlyuchenkova. Roddick leads Ferrer and Isner leads Simon both by two sets to one, and on serve in the fourth.
Pavlyuchenkova took a first-set lead against Serena, but Serena came back to win the set and then destroyed her in the second. Meanwhile Isner and Simon are playing their third tiebreak. Isner also won the first and third sets in tie breaks. So far, the match has lasted about 3:30. Don’t forget that the U.S. Open is the only major with a tiebreaker in the fifth set, so this one will end today unless the rain starts again.
At about the same moment, Isner and Roddick both won their matches. So Isner will play Murray and Roddick will play Nadal. It will be Isner’s first career major quarterfinal, and Roddick’s first since the 2010 Australian Open. Roddick hasn’t been to the U.S. Open quarters since 2008, in fact.