ILE rolling non-slam Tennis thread

woah so Safina withdrew because of a fracturing disc in her spine???? yikes, I kind of feel bad for making fun of her inability to win now

winced when i saw that yesterday but she said it wouldn't require surgery? don't know whether this is the same as/similar to the chronic back injuries which forced Kournikova and Golovin into retirement, hope not. i tend to take what tennis players say with a pinch of salt when it comes to their injuries, but Safina's not one of those who constantly claims to be on her deathbed before bravely rising from it to beat scrubs 0 and 1 without a hint of pain (Clijsters, Wozniacki).

caught a repeat of what happened earlier and it was kind of painful to watch, she was sobbing so hard. you're right though, safina hardly ever uses her injuries as excuses and as far as i can remember has never retired from a match regardless of how badly she's playing so it must be pretty bad if she really felt she couldn't play on. :/

Today's insanity: Bepa starts the match with an extended meltdown, going down 0-6, 2-5 and at one point having to play with tissues still shoved in her nose. But she has clawed her way back in to take the second set on a TB, saving two match points along the way - one with a Hawkeye overrule!

lol what? I stopped watching after she got broken in the second. -_-

god this match is so boring

Absurd. Caroline either cramping or her hamstring was really paining her, she collapsed on the ground serving at *5-4, 30-30 in the third and played the rest of the match with tears streaming down her face and pretty much hobbled. Of course, Bepa still managed to fuck up! HOW DO YOU EVEN LOSE THAT GAME BEPA OMG. Absurd.

apparently everything happens when i'm not watching. that match was so unbearably awful though.

oh yeah, hideous quality. Wozniacki with her usual midpaced nothing shots, and Bepa just refusing to go for anything, rally continues in this vein until someone hits a stupid error five miles out. when a match is like that I only tune in at the end of sets...

i know i wanted some bepa battiness but that was too much.

i'm back to hating on Caro btw. it always throws me when she whales a forehand and it falls like three feet inside the baseline.

Her FH is truly the stuff of nightmares. So weak.

Azarenka losing it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLMSONEBDNQ

My only prediction before the tournament was that both alternates would be used. One down!

good call now that Bepa's pulled out of Doha citing ankle injury which means A-Rad will playing Azarenka. Caro looked pretty terrible at the end of that last match, what happens if she pulls out too? I haven't watched one of these in years so i've no idea what the rules are at this point.

Utterly non-topical, just a bit of wtf trivia I came across...

i) go here, and change the years in the boxes to, say, 1992 and 2001;

ii) shrug at Mr Guilfoil's unremarkable results, not unlike thousands of other players who tried and failed;

iii) then click the "Biography" tab and marvel. Can anyone just show up or something?

I'm thinking that he was kind of abusing the notion of 'futures' there.

There was I being embarrassed at losing a club match to a white-haired 59-y-o when I was a teenager, and there's aspiring pro Brian Wright, dropping four games to a 77-y-o...

Gotta be wrong, surely?!

i dunno, these bottom-rung tournaments attract a huge variety of people trying their luck or just entering on a lark - as far as i know, you pay your fee and if there's space in the qualifying draw, you get in. 50-year-old dewonder davis has been playing US satellites for a decade. sometimes she's even won a couple of games!

and a lot of the younger "aspiring pros" are complete shit - look up the record of one brie whitehead, for example - so if that guilfoil dude was in good shape, even at 77, played an old-skool s&v game, it doesn't surprise me at all that someone who may not be more than a club hacker would lose games to him.

http://billg.usptapro.com/default.aspx/MenuItemID/351/MenuGroup/ProHome06.htm

yeah I can believe that he could offer a little embarrassment to some 17-year-old chump.

yeah all these smaller tournaments have pretty huge qualifying draws so it's not actually that difficult to get in and play a couple of matches if you can pay the entry fee. but that's pretty amazing regardless - that site says he was a world-ranked table tennis player as well.

here's victoria azarenka and caro wozniacki bringing some cute self-deprecating snark to the WTA about one minute in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fy9zF1l63v0

Can't stand either of them on a tennis court but no lie, I think they're both pretty fabulous. They're basically my anti-JJ, who i think is kind of a horrible person but who's great to watch when she's playing well.

Malisse and Wickmayer banned for a year for not filling in two whereabouts and missing one doping test (Malisse) and not filling in three whereabouts (Wickmayer).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/tennis/8345711.stm

I kind of want to rename this thread "Who is James Blake losing to this week?" ;_;

there's an up-and-coming dubstep producer called James Blake, lol.

the Wickmayer suspension is so fucked...she didn't even miss any tests. Surely she'll win her appeal though - when this case first came up, her argument that her password for the computer system to log her whereabouts failed (and then she wasn't at home to pick up the new one because hello, tennis players are always on tour) was backed up by IT records and the prosecutor recommended a warning, not a suspension. So this decision has to be down to jobsworthiness or politics. And looks particularly bad in the context of Gasquet and Agassi this year.

It was the Belgian doping authorities who nearly fucked Kuznetsova's career up a few years ago due to their idiocy, wasn't it? Hmmmm.

So there's a sort of 2nd-division round-robin event this week in Bali for all the WTA tournament winners who didn't qualify for Doha? Who knew? Is this the first time they've done this? Bit like the old Ladies' Plate event at Wimbledon (won by Sue Barker one year), for first-round losers (well, not very much like that then).

Even worse than that - it's the International event winners only, ie the former Tier III/Tier IV minnie-mouse tournaments traditionally won by nonentity journeywomen. It's not a terrible field, and I like all four SFists a lot (Bartoli, Martinez Sanchez, Date-Krumm, Rezai) but honestly there was no demand for any sort of round-robin event featuring the likes of Medina Garrigues and Czink, no justification for the huge points on offer (600 for the winner!!!) and just no point at all.

Plus having clear and specific qualification criteria is no good if you're going to have arbitrary WCs as well. The WTA is such a poorly-run organisation.

You may as well bring back for-TV invitational exhibition events with diamond-studded gold rackets as prizes (remember that Antwerp event Lendl always used to win?).

Not to mention that the biggest advantage of a four-groups-of-three RR system is that it can avoid any dead rubbers - and yet the WTA STILL manages to fuck this up with poor scheduling.

xp haha that was a WTA event for a while this decade - the diamond racket went to anyone who could win the tournament 3 times in five years, Mauresmo ended up winning it...

Lendl did the 3-in-5-years thing between '81 and '85 (the '85 final vs McEnroe was live on ITV, bizarrely - I can still remember the score: 1-6 7-6 6-2 6-2) and last I heard Ivan's blingy racket was in some bank vault somewhere.

Venus won it twice and for a while it was about the only tour event that she'd be 100% cast-iron guaranteed to show up at.

There was talk of bringing that diamond thing back in Antwerp now that local crowd and sponsor pullers Kim and Justine will be playing again but I don't know the latest news about this.

I hope Marat goes out in a blaze of racket smashing glory later today although i would love to see him go on a run to the semi's or final before losing to Nadal or Fed. His final match ought to be against one of those guys.

go out in style, marat.

video of him winning the USO in 2000...he was so beautiful then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iR-TkvFWkM

Marat a break down in the final set, looks like the end of the line

a really sad way for my favorite player to go out, if that's the case. His run at wimbledon a couple years ago was great though

It's all over :(

:( :( :(

I've been out mountain climbing for the past week or so and was hoping to get back in time to catch Maratski's last match (against JMDP of all people - there's a nice symmetry there, two twenty year olds who toppled undeniable greats at the USO) and wouldn't you know it... just six hours late. :(

goodbye you crazy beautiful bastard.

i missed it too, too much work :(

good to see he scrubbed up well for his farewell. would say "great career" except it was more about wasted talent, but at least he was ridiculously beautiful...except as often as not he wasted that too, with strange facial hair and such. loved him anyway.

yeah and the worst thing about it is that he had started looking really fantastic again over the past few months - not just looks-wise but even playing like he cares again. just wanting to make us miss him more, i suppose. gahhh.

You may as well bring back for-TV invitational exhibition events with diamond-studded gold rackets as prizes (remember that Antwerp event Lendl always used to win?).

― Michael Jones, Friday, November 6, 2009 4:29 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark

December 9th, Antwerp: Kim Clijsters vs. Venus Williams.

http://www.thomascookdiamondgames.be/

Um, I don't think Yanina's 4 court cases against that 1 year ban will be over by then:

Schedule Thomas Cook Diamond Games
7pm: Yanina Wickmayer - Patty Schnyder
8.30pm: Music show (Milk Inc)
9.30pm: Kim Clijsters - Venus Williams

exos aren't proper "competition", she'll be allowed to play unless the organiser disinvites her. she'd be wise to - they're paid hefty sums to play these and it looks like she won't have an income next year...

According to the local press here she isn't allowed to play at exhibition matches.

They (Wickmayer and Malisse) have assembled a team of 7 lawyers, one of them Melchior Wathelet, the former minister of justice and top judge at the European Court of Justice, to appeal against the decision in four different courts.

really looking forward to reading agassi's memoir after that NYT piece

really looking forward to reading agassi's memoir after that NYT piece

REALLY

Draw for the World Tour Finals (the WTFs) is out.

Group A: Federer, Murray, Del Potro, Verdasco
Group B: Nadal, Djokovic, Davydenko, Soderling (replacing Roddick who's injured)

Extra incentive to watch this year, as apparently not a single player's year-end ranking is safe. well except maybe Roger's, but Rafa can still finish no. 1 if Roger somehow loses badly in all 3 RR matches and Rafa goes on to win the title without dropping a single match (unlikely?). Fed-Murray/Murray-Delpo/Delpo-Fed matches should all be totally fun anyway, unless Delpo withdraws with that abdominal strain he got last week.

More interested in the real rivalry of '09, which is Nadal vs Djokovic - including the WTFs, they'll have played each other 7 times this year (and 21 in total, one more than the total number of Fed-Rafa career meetings! lol Fedal rivalry fail). Nadal won the first four of the year, Nole the last two. Djoko's also on a roll after winning Basel and Paris in the past two weeks, beating both Fed and Nadal on the way; and could well go to no. 2 if he wins the whole thing and Rafa loses at least two of his RR matches. OR Djokovic could fail miserably while Murray wins the whole thing and takes over no. 3. And so on and so forth.

also note that Rafa has lost to all three players in his half in their most recent meetings so i'm hoping he gets at least one revenge win there.

but tbh, given every player's current form, it's just as likely nothing will change at all - it's just fun to think that one or two matches could make the difference as no one in the top 9 really has a significant lead over their closest competitors. WTFs indeed.

Well, bless my missus - she's only gone and got me a ticket for the Wednesday evening session as an anniversary present. (It's our 11th and her gift for our 1st was for the Blackrock Masters at the RAH - McEnroe, Leconte, Bahrami, etc). I have a horrible feeling I'm going to get the Bryan twins plus Davydenko-Soderling, but what the hell*. I lived in Greenwich for 18 months and never even went to the Dome, so this is a first.

(* - groups were drawn today so I assume the schedule follows tomorrow?)

that's really sweet of your wife. congrats on the anniversary! :)

schedules for sunday and monday are out and yeah looks like group B will be playing wednesday, but if you're lucky you might get djoko-sod, kolya-nadal, or djoko-nadal rather than sod-kolya.

Click play.

The Bryan Brothers Band feat Novak Djokovic & Andy Murray - Autograph

I... have no words.

(can we start a tennis lols thread?)

I was right about the Bryans and half-right about the singles - it's Nadal-Kolya, which suits me fine.