I say leave it as it is. I hate final-set tie-breaks, they seem so anticlimactic.
This is just incomprehensible. I assume it won’t last very long tomorrow, but who knows. And this is still a first round match! Whoever wins is going to have to play De Bakker on Friday, and whoever wins that match is going to play again on Saturday - against either Mikhail Youzhny or Paul-Henri Mathieu - so whoever gets Youzhny/Mathieu is probably screwed, too. I got the prize money wrong above. I thought this was a second-round match. First-round losers get 11,250 pounds ($16,600).
The Thursday schedule is out… and they didn’t count on this. De Bakker and Isner or Mahut are scheduled to play on Court 18 (where today’s match happened) after two women’s singles matches are complete. Probably they’ll fix this soon so it says Mahut-Isner will finish after Radwanska-Brianti and Pennetta-Niculescu. Scheduling these guys in the late afternoon is the compassionate thing to do even though it does feel like tempting fate.
And I think this has to be noted again: Mahut had to qualify just to get into the draw, which means he played three matches last week just to get in the tournament! On Monday the 14th, he beat Frank Dancevic 6-3, 6-0. On Tuesday the 15th he beat Alex Bogdanovic 3-6, 6-3, 24-22. And on Thursday the 17th, he upset Stefan Koubek in a five-set match in which he lost the first two sets and came back to win 6-7 (8), 3-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4. All of that so he could start playing Isner on Tuesday. Isner has been resting since he lost in the third round of the French Open on May 28.
By the way, these guys played each other on grass at Queen’s two years ago. Mahut won 7-5, 6-4.
Looks like Isner is just feeling him out, probing for his weakspots and wotnot. 
Rather than changing the rules, wouldn’t it be easier just to build a few damn lights? I assume it isn’t as easy as all that, or they’d have done it by now.
ETA: Go Dawgs.
I know the U.S. Open has lights on all the courts. Wimbledon doesn’t and Roland Garros doesn’t. I’m not sure about Australia. Considering how rarely this happens it might not be worth the money, believe it or not.
Now that all the fun is over for the day, I have a question: What facilitated this?
To expound, how has the actual tennis being played kept one of them from breaking the other? Are they just serving and holding serve that well? Is it really that simple?
They’ve both shattered the ace record. They really are serving that well.
I didn’t see the entire match so I can’t speak to how they played yesterday, but what I saw today, it was just that they held serve that well. Both of them were in the 90s for aces!! Most pros wont serve 90 aces in a two week long tournament!
Near the end Isner wasn’t really going for many shots. He was just returning the ball if it was hit directly to him. He knew he could just keep winning his serve and hope Mahut finally got tired.
Isner is 6’9" and because of his height, his serve is extremely hard to break. Mahut only had one break point until some time late in the fifth set. Isner also has huge reach. I never thought of Mahut as a huge server, not that I am an expert on his game. Wikipedia describes him as a serve and volleyer, so if his game was really clicking on grass, his serve would also be very hard to break. There were few long points. And as the match wore on, they both got too tired to do anything other than hold serve. There were not a lot of break chances late.
Wiki says the match is scheduled to resume at 9 a.m. local time on the same court, number 18. So I guess they are taking no chances and trying not to disrupt anyone else’s schedule. Of course by now, this match has its own entry.
Wimbledon’s site says “not before 15:30” (and wikipedia has been updated to reflect that).
Scroll down and you’ll see that Isner and Mahut both have doubles matches tomorrow, too.
That is absolutely hilarious. I’m finding everything about this match hilarious, and I’m not even into tennis.
It’s that simple. They are also so tired that they can’t seem to rise up to break one another’s serve.
They are serving great, though.
Hell, by the end they could barely raise their racquets for groundstrokes or move to cover the court. Some match statistics here. I’m glad they’re not starting until at least 10:30 Eastern, because I was seriously considering getting up before dawn to see the end of this thing.
I saw some of the Marathon Match. I’m not convinced it was anything other than a show for the record books. I don’t care how well you’re serving, you don’t belong out there if you allow your opponent to serve 100 aces. Even if your opponent serves really, really well, every player develops a rhythm that makes them somewhat predictable – He’ll go down the tee when he’s down by two, he’ll go out wide for the first point – and the ability to pick up on that rhythm is a big part of what makes a great tennis player. I’ve seen Nadal commit to one side before the serve was ever struck, only to have it hit the court ten feet behind him – true champions do SOMETHING other than just stand there and shrug. There were points when Isner didn’t even put out his racquet. Give me a break.
As they got off the court, the first thing Isner said was that he’d like to see the statistics. That convinced me that, at some point, both men decided to play for the record books, which included deliberately playing a lackluster return of serve game. There’s no way in hell either will have anything left in their tank for the next round, so now they’re just content to run up the score as high as they can to become a part of Wimbledon history. In short, I think the Marathon Match has included quite a bit of acting.
PunditLisa something like what you’re getting at is what I attempted to allude to in my previous post. I have a suspicion it really shouldn’t have gone one that long if one them truly wanted to just end the damn match.
But then I remember, the winner will still have to play afterwards, so it is always in their best interest to play as little as possible. At least for Isner. Mahut, being a “lower tier” player this is a perfect chance to get his name in the record books pretty much forever. So it seems to fall more on Isner to have ended this whole thing much sooner.
On a third hand, I am no tennis expert or even an actual player of tennis, so maybe they are truly having that hard of a time breaking each other’s serve. This isn’t too hard to believe considering that the last break of serve was in the second set. Third and fourth went to the tiebreaker.
You’re both way off.
I can live with that. PL seems a little more invested in the position she’s taken.
Pundit and Bees, both of these guys are true competitors.
They aren’t just intentionally going on forever and there is no evidence they are.
I would say it seems incredibly unlikely. There is no evidence they knew each other prior to the match.
I would think that when you are that tired you simply can’t lunge for every return. Maybe you get a weak shot back, but there is no way you can put everything into every point when there is so little left in the tank.
I get the impression that you play tennis. Have you never played a match that went on so long, or the heat was so intense, that no matter how much your brain said “run”, your body just wouldn’t move anymore? Those guys played almost 10 hours of tennis in two days at a level I can’t even begin to imagine. They weren’t faking, they were dog tired.
As you pointed out, neither will have anything in their tank for the next round, so where was the benefit of running up the score? If they were just looking for the record books, they could have quit at 30 - 32, or when they had broken the ace record, or the match length record, and still maybe recovered enough to have a semi decent second round. You are certainly entitled to your opinion, I just don’t see what you were seeing.