I’m not impugning Murray’s ability, which is worthy of being a Grand Slam champ, for sure. I’m just speculating that he may be cursed, like the Red Sox. 
I guess he’ll have a nice period of time when Federer fades/retires to increase his odds of getting Slam or two under his belt, too.
Did you guys see that a man ran out and tried(succeeded?) to kiss Nadal?
Reminds me of the guy at the French open that tried to put a beret/hat on Federer during the final.
I guess it’s hard to have perfect security. I get worried about another Monica Seles situation, especially with how hands-on the Federer chaser got.
I didn’t see it because we’d both drifted off at that hour. But yes, to have that happen twice in one year is upsetting. I said after the French final that I was sorry Federer didn’t give the guy an overhead smash for the forehead.
Wickmayer got through to the semis, and will play the winner of tonight’s Oudin-Wozniacki match. One of the ESPN commentators pointed out that there are two unseeded Belgian women in the semifinals. Talk about your long odds. (This was used as an immediate segue into Henin speculation, of course.)
Djokovic and Verdasco are playing now. They were wearing nearly identical orange shirts at the start of the match, which is probably not helpful to casual viewers. Djokovic took the first set in a tiebreak, but then Verdasco rolled over him 6-1 in the second. They’re at 1-all in the third after Djokovic fought off another break challenge.
What the heck happened to Djokovich? He won the first set handily and then…
Okay, let’s talk outfits. I like that men’s tennis fashion is more fitted this year. Roddick and Nadal, notably, are now wearing shirts that don’t look two sizes two big. Now if they’d just shorten the shorts by about 2 inches so that I can see that lovely muscle that sits on top of the knee, I’d be very happy.
The women’s fashion: oy vey. The worst, by far, was McHale’s yellow Nike banded shirt. It was supposed to band above the breasts, I guess, but on her short waisted figure, the band was tight across mid-breast, making what little boobs she had look like they were cut in half horizontally. Horrible. I’m surprised Nike reps didn’t go out and demand she take it off. She would have looked far better in just a sports bra.
Wozniacki has a lovely figure, but the lavendar, drapey thing made her look twenty pounds heavier. It’s what all we ladies want, really.
Venus, Venus, Venus. Why the cap sleeves? Why the little gathers around the waist? You have lovely biceps. Show them off. Her outfits always seem to hit just short of the mark.
Hated the red and purple combination worn by (forget her name).
Most of the skirts are too short.
Don’t like how they’ve had several instances where players wore the exact same outfit. Verdasco’s shirt is the same color (a great orange color) as Djokovic’s, which is confusing enought. There have been instances where both women were wearing the exact same outfit. Can they not try and coordinate this better?
This is a universal impossibility. Humans will travel through time before there is ever a skirt that is too short.
And Verdasco is the ugly one with a white hat on and Novak isn’t. 
And thus ends the fairy tale. Wozniacki beats Oudin in straight sets.
Now if you’ll excuse me, my tennis watching has come to an end for the day, as Roger v. Robin is going to be boring as fuck.
It’ll be a straight set win for Roger where he will break Robin easily, then easily hold serve. Seen it a million times against other people and grew weary of very quickly.
[del]Gary Oldman[/del] Soderling barely showed up for the start of this one but the last two sets were really excellent. Federer was not playing badly, although he missed a few key shots and seemed to be sulking a little, and Soderling pushed him to two straight tiebreaks. I’ve gotten to like Soderling, so it’s a shame he’s run into Federer in the quarters here and in the fourth round at Wimbledon. But this was his best U.S. Open ever, by far - he’d never been past the third round and hadn’t won a match in New York at all since 2006. Really impressive year for Soderling. I don’t know where he’ll be ranked after this week but I expect he’ll keep going up and I hope to see a lot more of him.
I’m not surprised Oudin finally ran out of gas, but she had a wonderful run and you have to like her prospects after she did so well at two slams in a row. Here’s guessing she’ll be a seeded player, not to mention obviously a fan favorite, at the 2010 U.S. Open.
I still have my reservations about Oudin. The one time she played someone with a different style game than the Russians, she lost without putting up almost any fight. Sure her mental game started to pick up in the second set, but this translated to pretty much nothing physically. The Russians have a style of play that Oudin’s style is adept at beating, or at least standing ground with. Her very positive mental game, combined with her opponent’s lack thereof, additionally combined with her advantageous style of play lead to her making it as far as she did.
I don’t expect to see her in or passed the fourth round of the Australian Open, she’ll go out in one of the first three.
Oudin’s never going to be an imposing physical specimen, so she’s got more developing to do. But she beat some excellent players along the way and she has a solid game and solid nerves. It’s possible she never does this again, sure, but she is only 17 and reached the round of 16 at Wimbledon before her results in New York. She beat some good players there, too. If her game only works against certain types of players - well, there appear to be plenty of those kinds of players. She got Bammer (29), Jankovic (6), Dementieva (4), Sharapova (29), Petrova (13), and she lost to two players who were around the top ten.
For the record, though, I don’t know if Dementieva (who hits very hard and plays amazing defense) and Sharapova (who hits very hard and is always on offense because she covers the court poorly) are THAT similar.
I’ll concede her win against Dementieva was the more impressive of the batch. The others don’t have me convinced she’s The Next Big Thing just yet.
She doesn’t have a big weapon yet, but she did have a lot of big game poise until this latest match, where she just kinda lost it. It was disappointing, and I think part of it may have had to do with her being out on the practice courts way too much the day before and the day of the match.
I think that if she continues to work on her game, she’ll be in the top 10 and in serious Slam contention.
Soderling definitely looked like a serious threat in the third and fourth sets. He was incredibly close to forcing a fifth set, and that would have been very interesting. Federer still probably woulda pulled it out, since he seems to be able to tap that inner reserve of oomph whenever he needs it. I never quite realized how much Federer relies on his serve to get him out of trouble. Don’t know how many sloppy service games were saved by key aces and unreturned serves.
And Soderling is knocked out of a major by Federer for the third time this year. That’s gotta sting, but at the same time, he can tell himself it takes the greatest player ever to stop him at the big tournies.
Nadal - Fed is looking more and more likely now, and I’d love to see the Nadal of the Monfils match take his shot against Roger here.
Pssssssssst! “past”, not “passed”. 
But I think her mental toughness is ahead of what you might expect; her game, I agree, not so much.
I went to bed after the first two sets, and the commentators were talking about the biggest occurrences of players “not showing up” for their big matches, like Safin in the Australian Open against Johansen.
Glad to hear the final two sets were better.
I’ll also add to the group that agrees that Oudin is not necessarily going to be a huge player/factor in the future. I’m just not seeing the same kind of confidence Serena Williams had around the same age.
Federer is about as good as anyone at coming up with the big ace when he needs it. I’m not sure who was doing color on the match for the US Open site broadcast - I think it was Courier - but he made a very good point about how much Federer trusts his game. He’s not afraid to go for it on the big points. Late in the match, he went for some bigger than usual second serves instead of playing it safe.
Of course it’s more likely; they’re two of the six guys left. But don’t sleep on Del Potro.
She doesn’t have remotely the physical tools Serena does. Nobody does, except for Venus. A better comparison would be to Henin, who started making a name for herself at around Oudin’s age but didn’t start competing for majors and getting close to the top of the world rankings for another two years or so.
Some amazing stats from ESPN.
Federer has won his last 126 matches against players outside the top 5.
Venus and Serena are the only two active players (male and female) to win majors in singles, double, and mixed doubles.
I really disliked both Williams sisters when they debuted, but I have become a fan in the last couple of years. I am glad that they play doubles and I wish more players would play doubles. I enjoy watching a competitive doubles match.
There’s something really rare: a Federer statistic we haven’t heard before! I was looking around for which of those players last beat him and read that he has actually never lost to a player outside the top five in a grand slam event.
The top men rarely play doubles, so I’m not that surprised about this. But Venus and Serena are both terrific at doubles due to their power and speed and their tough serves. It’s tough to catch both of them on a bad day on the same day.
Nobody pays a lot of attention to mixed doubles, but this is interesting: in 1998, Serena’s team made the mixed doubles final at the Australian and the French, and won Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. Venus’ team won the Australian and the French and lost in the finals at Wimbledon. So at least one Williams sister won every mixed doubles major that year, and they played each other in the finals three times.
God damn it to hell! I specifically stopped and thought about which one was correct. Is “passed” ever correct?
Is its only correct useage “He passed me.” or some variation of such a sentence?
Her mental toughness was the only thing I was complimenting, how much more ahead of that can it be? 
I hate the Williams sisters, but love to watch them play doubles. Hate to watch and root against them in singles; I just get a “better than thou” vibe off them. As an example, they tend not to pocket an extra ball on first serve, but rather look to have second serve balls thrown in to them. I’m guessing they don’t like the way a tennis ball in the pocket makes their outfit look or whatever, but it just grates on me. Still, as a doubles team they’re tons of fun to watch. Maybe it’s because they’re really good but not uber-dominant like in singles play.
Loved watching Clijsters beat Venus a few days back to get the contrast in grunts. Venus: Loud. Clijsters: Silent. Toward the end Kim let out a couple “natural sound” quiet grunts that were clearly a natural expression of exertion. Not the shrill, affected grunts so many of the top women employ, such as the Williams sisters, Sharapova, et al.
Was totally on the Oudin train while watching her beat Petrova, but then she ran into a brick wall of Ellis fandom: Wozniacki, who is way hotter. IIRC, Wickmayer is also pretty cute, so I look forward to that match. One nice thing about that match was neither player grunted. It got me thinking about how much I can’t stand Nadal and his grunting.
One of the announcers summed up perfectly what I think a problem the women’s tour is, though she didn’t couch it that way. When describing Wozniacki, she said that she’d earned her top ten ranking by virtue of steady but unspectacular play. Ain’t that the truth. How many winners were there total in the Oudin-Wozniacki match? Was it even double digits? Wow that was some tough tennis to watch. The winner doesn’t win so much as the loser loses. It’s like watching a boxer losing by hitting below the belt too many times. Highly unsatisfying.
Which got me thinking about the Clijsters-V. Williams match, and the hail of winners Clijsters rained down. Well, she probably was around even with winners and unforced errors, but compared to the 1:10 ratio from the Oudin-Wozniacki match, it felt like a whole different sport. That was a match well-earned, and that’s the kind of tennis I like to see. So, bottom line: Go Kimmy!