By Rosangel Valenti, TW Contributing Editor
Good morning. This is the Tribe's regular daily space for general tennis talk, and match-calling. You can use this post to go off-topic too.
I spent yesterday at Queen's Club again, to see the quarterfinal action. From a spectator's point of view, the best match of the day was probably the one between Richard Gasquet and David Nalbandian, as the two proved to be evenly matched, and there were plenty of examples of fine retrieving and shotmaking. I still think that Gasquet is playing less attacking tennis than I remember seeing from him in his earlier days on the tour, but he's looking more comfortable than he had been in recent times on clay. David Nalbandian was definitely pumped up for this match - his body language was all business, without loss of focus. The match went to a final-set tiebreaker - a fitting conclusion.
The match between Novak Djokovic and Lleyton Hewitt wasn't particularly exciting, as Djokovic won with a lopsided scoreline, and Hewitt took some unkind barracking from certain parties in the crowd. I noticed a number of comments made by the Tribe about the match between Rafael Nadal and Ivo Karlovic yesterday. As often happens in matches involving Karlovic on a fast surface, the match went to tiebreaks - three, as it happens, the last of which was won by Nadal. The lack of energy in the crowd when watching Karlovic serving ace after ace was palpable - after a while, people ceased to even clap, except in the most perfunctory manner. Now, there's a certain interest, over the course of a match, for some dedicated tennis fans, in seeing whether the receiver can put in a few fine returns off these serves, and get a rally of some sort going - and for a player like Nadal, he's the favourite in many rallies if this happens. There was no doubt that he was yesterday's crowd favourite in that match (even though sending down a number of aces himself) because not only is he well-liked here, he was the one providing most of the "entertainment". Tennis is, among other things, a business, so to an extent, I can't help thinking that too many players in the Karlovic mould wouldn't be good for business, impressive as his main weapon is.
I'm heading back to Queen's shortly, for the semifinals. As always, enjoy today's tennis.