LONDON—Does there come a point for the British when the weather itself becomes life’s primary source of entertainment? That’s the way it felt through most of Saturday afternoon here. The rain came down, let up, came down, let up, and came down; the clouds gathered and broke up and gathered and broke up. The pattern lasted long enough to keep the players off the courts at Queen’s Club for four hours. By 3:00 P.M., all a journalist could do was Tweet updates about whether the covers had come off the grass or not. By 5:00, the sun had made its fashionably late arrival at last, the nets had been put back up, the ball kids and officials had taken their positions, and everything looked ready to go. Naturally, the clouds rolled back in one more time and let out a last blast of rain for the road. This time there were laughs from the audience.
It wasn’t as much fun for Lleyton Hewitt and Marin Cilic. Between raindrops, they had managed to get in two games and 15 minutes of play, and Hewitt had somehow hit five double faults in that time. Worse, when the skies finally cleared, the two were booted from the main stadium onto the much smaller Court 1 so that the home favorite, Andy Murray, could play in the bigger arena. Hewitt called this breach of tour policy—matches are supposed to finish on the courts where they start—“really, really strange” and said that “the ATP guy” who made the decision “panicked.” The tournament’s defense was that the other semifinal, between Murray and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, would surely draw the bigger crowd. They said they couldn’t justify moving that match to a court which seats 6,000 fewer people—and also, not coincidentally, has far fewer TV cameras.
However it went down behind the scenes, there were suddenly two semifinals going on at the same time at Queen’s. For those of us in the press seats, which have a view of both courts, it was a head-snapping experience. It’s hard enough to keep track of every point in one match; forget about two. On a few occasions I succeeded in missing what happened on crucial points in both matches. Still, it felt like a reward for the long-suffering fans who had spent their Saturday staring at court covers.
As predicted, only a handful of those fans chose to watch Cilic and Hewitt. There seemed, at times, to be more people on Court 1 than there were in the bleachers. But one very vociferous and persistent Hewitt fan did make his presence felt. He celebrated every one of Rusty's winning points with a “Come on!” It was as if he wanted to save Hewitt the energy of having to do it himself.
The match was played in a suitably ornery spirit—put two frustrated, slighted players on a court without Hawk-Eye and you had a recipe either for a disaster, a highly entertaining evening of tennis, or both. Hewitt and Cilic did their best to oblige. Hewitt challenged chair umpire James Keothavong early and often, so often that when Keothavong overruled a call against Cilic, the normally placid Croat stormed forward and yelled, referring to Hewitt, “He’s putting pressure on you!”
Hewitt didn’t let that stop him. Later, he asked an elderly line judge, “Can you see?” and tossed a ball in Keothavong’s direction to show him that there was “Chalk on it, mate”—his shot, in other words, had been in, and Hewitt believed the line judge had botched another call. We had returned to the days of semifinals without replay.
“Obviously, it’s frustrating,” Hewitt said afterward. “We started on Centre Court where you have Hawk-Eye, and I feel like there were a couple of rough calls on Court 1. You’re in a semifinal and you feel like you have a couple of rough calls and you can’t challenge.”