!FloBy Rosangel Valenti, TW Contributing Editor
Good morning. This is the Tribe's regularly scheduled daily Your Call post for discussing and match-calling tennis. You can use this space to go off-topic as well.
As will be the case for the rest of the week, I spent the day at Queen's Club yesterday, mainly following the matches that were taking place on Centre Court. The top seeds at the championship have first-round byes, which means that the likes of Nadal and Djokovic don't commence playing singles until today.
The match of the day for me yesterday might have been the Andy Murray-Sebastien Grosjean encounter, but unfortunately, Grosjean, a man who knows a lot about playing on grass, developed a leg injury shortly after the match started.Thus, the most compelling contest turned out to be the long match between last year's finalist Nicolas Mahut and Feliciano Lopez - both with games well-suited to grass, and also fully pumped-up for the match. After losing the first set 5-7, Lopez took the second set in a tiebreak (aided by two untimely double-faults from his opponents).
The ending of the match was controversial. On the first point of the third-set tiebreaker, with Mahut serving, Lopez hit a clean winner. As he did so, some faceless soul deep in the bowels of Queen's Club must have hit a panic button by accident, because an alarm went off, and a recorded announcement began playing, that would have asked the public to leave the grounds due to an emergency. It was cut off abruptly. However, the unscheduled interruption led to an unfortunate situation - the umpire, Steve Ulrich, decreed that the point needed to be replayed. Lopez (and, I have to say, his point seemed a valid one, in that there was no way that Mahut could have reached the ball) protested loudly. Then he asked for the supervisor to be called "so that he can explain me the rule".
I have no idea why Ulrich didn't call the supervisor at this point, with the intention of validating his decision. Instead, he ended up giving the clearly upset Lopez (who had, after all, battled fiercely to reach this point in the match, serving with the pressure of the scoreboard in on him during the third set) a code violation warning for holding up play. Lopez lost the replayed point, and went down a mini-break. At the change of ends, he continued to grumble at the umpire - and although there was a handshake at the end, more words were exchanged. As a spectator, I didn't mind who won, but didn't enjoy seeing the match end in this way. No match is decided by a single point, and a professional player needs to be able to move on after a moment lke this. However, it was a tough point to be deprived of, and I'm not at all sure that the umpire's decision was the right one. It felt as though the disputed point decided the match.
