"Serious Tennis Fan" - A Profile

• A serious tennis fan is one that watches tennis outside of the four Grand Slams.
• A serious tennis fan is one who'll go to great lengths to find that stream of a first round match between the #49 and the #173 ranked players. At 2am in the morning.
• A serious tennis fan will be able to identify that the two players practicing on the court before him are Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova and Flavia Pennetta. He will also be able to spell their names.
• A serious tennis fan knows the difference between David Ferrer and Juan Carlos Ferrero.
• A serious tennis fan will regularly moan about the lack of coverage of doubles matches.
• A serious tennis fan will be able to name all the women who won a Grand Slam in 2011. He'll also recognize them if he were to see them on the street.
• A serious tennis fan has more than one favourite player to cheer for. Including players outside the top5, 10, 50 or 100.
• A serious tennis fan might *gasp* follow matches on the Challenger circuit, and even *double gasp* on the Futures level.
• A serious tennis fan will be able to name at least 5 chair umpires.
• A serious tennis fan is one who spent a few hours staring at a black little window called "livescores", while silently cursing to himself, and occasionally shouting out words in different languages.

A serious tennis fan might be all of the above, or none of them. But he's first and foremost a fan of TENNIS, not of Fed, Rafa or Nole.

Roland Garros, 3rd round - Del Potro vs. Djokovic, 1:1

By now, fans have quite a few reasons to be disappointed with the 2011 edition of the French Open. First, we had the "transcriptgate" (reccommended reading!), which deprived us of the possibility to actually read for ourselves what the players were saying after their matches, and forced us to get all the news from the official media representatives on site. Never mind that they put things out of context, and only deliver "relevant quotes" of the players that they're interested in. By now, it's possible to find the transcripts online, even if not on the official Roland Garros site, which still says:

The written transcripts from the press conferences will not appear on this page this year. The transcripts are for the use of journalists but you can still watch our video coverage of the press conferences. For the hearing-impaired or those who do not have sound on their computer, quotes appear in the articles written by our journalists and in written interviews. Thank you for your understanding.

 But if that wasn't enough, today we encountered an even larger mishap, quite possibly. The order of play for today on Philipp Chatrier included two women's matches, followed by two men's matches. The last of which was the highly anticipated third round match between Juan Martin Del Potro and Novak Djokovic. In a tournament that can't hold matches as soon as the darkness falls over, due to lack of lights infrastracture, it's easy to get to the end of the day with play still not completed. And so, as Jo Wilfried Tsonga was unable to finish his match against Stanislas Wawrinka in three sets, it became clear the Del Potro and Djokovic would have to wait some more before going on court.

Was it so hard to predict that if all matches go the distance (as indeed they did), the last match won't be played? Of course not. But in the words of Neil Harman:

When are we going to allow tennis people to make decisions, rather than TV execs who don't care a **** for tennis making all the calls?

And so, the most promising match of this week was moved in the last moment from Philipp Chatrier to Suzanne Lenglen, a somewhat smaller court, with separate tickets. Which also meant that the ticket holders who planned to watch this match, found out that they can't get on the court where it was held. Now, this decision at least makes some sense, since the general rule is that the last match on any court may be moved. But this is exactly why it was a mistake to put it as the last match, instead of the third. The Frenchman for whom it was done ended up losing a five-setter anyway, and the crowd just got upset, booing outside the stadium, which mainly interrupted the players themselves.

I won't say too much about the match, since it's not over yet, and it's hard to say what will happen. Both players won a set with a 6-3 score and a single break of serve. We got everything we bargained for - brilliant backhands from Djokovic, fantastic forehands from Del Potro, and terrific tennis to leave us speechless, or slightly hysteric, depending on your liking of both players. The two players showed great sportsmanship, and both obliged to sign some autographs in the end of the second set, which closed out the day.

Tomorrow we'll have the second part of that match, still strangely scheduled as the third match on Suzanne Lenglen. I'm hoping that the players will come in a better mood, and well rested - they're going to need all their physical and mental strengths in order to win this. The match is wide open at this point, and the lucky winner will get to play another Frenchman, Richard Gasquet, who will be well rested for Sunday's fourth round.

Tennis journalists annoy me

I was originally intending to finish writing all the "Going back in time" posts before I actually start posting about real-time events. But then several things happened, and I feel the urge to rant about them at length.

So, what did we have this weekend? Nadal won his 7th title in Monte-Carlo, but that's routine ;) Although I do have something to say about Rafa, too, but I'll save it for a later post.

But for the ladies, it was Fed Cup time. There were some expected results (Russia beat Italy), some unexpected results (Ukraine beat Australia), and some reactions from journalists, which is what I want to talk about.

The USA team, missing both Williams sisters and Bethanie Mattek-Sands, lost to Germany in Stuttgart, and for the first time ever (*Gasp*) will not be a part of the World Group in 2012. They will have to contend in the World Group II competitions, along with teams such as France, Slovakia, and Australia. Those are hardly second-rate teams, and yet - look at Peter Bodo's reaction to that loss:

As of this morning, the U.S. moves into the land of relegation, where it will have to battle the likes of Franco-Dutch Antibes, Andorra, Malta, Iceland, Kiribati, Great Britian and other minor tennis powers in order to get back into the big show it once dominated as the most successful tennis power to date.

And some more:

Let's hope we get a good draw for the WG II first-round next year and please, oh please, let us not draw Burkina Faso!

Alright, I get it. It's an attempt at an humorous outlook on what must be a disappointment for US tennis. But to me, it all just sounds extremely condescending. It's not as if the US team was relegated to Zone group II. It's World Group II. And it has some good teams, with great tennis players, and I'm sure that whoever USA will get in the first round draw will give us an interesting tie, with its share of Fed Cup surprises. But right now, without its best rackets, the team is exactly where it should be, and saying "Oh no, we'll have to play against some lowly teams", along with the usual "Fed Cup is boring" nonsense is simply aggravating.

Moving on to what was probably the most interesting tie of the weekend, and certainly the most dramatic one - Slovak republic vs. Serbia. I won't attempt to describe the weekend's events, as it's been done better before, but I do want to talk about the reaction of one, Matt Cronin, to Serbia's (awesome) win. It started with this:



... and after all the fury of tennis fans on twitter was unleashed on him, he proceeded with some more comments about them never being friends, and him knowing this from personal talks with both.
What I wanted to say it this: Without even getting into the personal likes or dislikes of both Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic, Cronin's original comment was simply not true.
First of all, I'm pretty sure that most of Ana's fans wanted Serbia to win, regardless of their feelings for JJ. So no, it wasn't a nightmare for them. I'm not even talking about Serbian tennis fans, who surely were thrilled to see the team winning, no matter which player was their favorite.



Secondly, Cronin makes it sound as though JJ won the tie all by herself. Obviously, she gave it all yesterday, and won the matches that (eventually) mattered. But she didn't do it all by herself. Aleksandra Krunic had a great part in that final rubber, and, regarding Cronin's comment - it was Ana who won the first point for Serbia, giving the team its chances to even get to a deciding rubber. So, to sum it up - it really was a team effort, even if the team members aren't BFFs.



What pisses me off, mostly, is the attempt (intentional or not, I don't know) to take a great win and to turn it into over-dramatized discussion of who's friends with whom. It was unnecessary, and in my opinion - completely missed the point of what Fed Cup is all about.

As this post already became much longer than I intended, I'll add just one more thing that annoyed me:
The same Matt Cronin later delivered the news that Francesca Schiavone has pulled out of the Stuttgart tournament, due to exhaustion. Which turned out to be completely untrue. So I don't know what that was about, but my respect for some tennis journalists probably just hit an all time low...

End of rant.

(Photos: Srdjan Stevanovic, via Fed Cup site)