Playing On Madrid Time

Each May, the tennis world spends a week living on Madrid time. This is a city where, in my limited experience, dinner is only reluctantly served before 10 P.M., and where tennis matches routinely cross into the wee hours of the following morning.

But what happened on Wednesday at the Caja Magica was, as Andy Murray put it, slightly “ridiculous.” After a long day of three-setters on center court, Murray and his opponent, Philipp Kohlschreiber, didn’t walk on until after midnight, and didn’t walk off until the clock struck 3:00 and the only people left in the stands appeared to be Murray’s coaching team. Even night-owl Madrilenians weren’t going to stay up that late.

The problem comes from trying to squeeze too many matches into too little time. Madrid schedulers typically put four of them in the main stadium, Santana, during the day session. It’s understandable: That’s by far the best court in the complex, and the only one that can house the crowds that turn out for Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, each of whom was on the bill yesterday.

Still, going late didn’t hurt Murray or Svetlana Kuznetsova, who won her match at midnight on Wednesday. Each of them rebounded to win again on Thursday. In fact, Murray might want to stay up on a regular basis: He blitzed Marcel Granollers 6-2, 6-0 in 64 minutes, the fastest win of his career on clay. Sleep, as we like to say during the Australian Open, is obviously for the weak.

Here’s a look back at a less-prolonged Thursday at the Caja Magica, and a look ahead at another loaded two sessions on Friday.

“Every season after the hard courts and after Miami you know you’re going to get your clay-court shoes out. Usually it’s a bittersweet moment, because I would be like, OK, the next three months are going to be very tough. Little by little my perception and idea of transitioning to the clay changed.”

!This was Maria Sharapova speaking earlier in the week about her surprising evolution into a clay-courter over the last five years. When she was younger, Maria and dirt never seemed to go together; now the French Open is the only major she’s won since 2008. The change began with her attitude to the surface and the challenge it presented. What seems characteristic of Sharapova is that it was a defeat, rather than a victory, that made her believe she could win the French Open. She said that after she walked off a loser to Justine Henin in three sets in Paris in 2010, “I really believed I could win the French Open one day.”

Since then, this has been Sharapova’s most productive part of the year, but she didn’t start it on a high note in 2015. Instead of winning the title in Stuttgart, as she had the three previous seasons, she lost her opener to an inspired Angelique Kerber. At the time, it looked a bad omen for Maria, who has struggled this year. But maybe that match was more about Kerber’s good play than it was Sharapova’s bad, because on Thursday the Russian showed off what I thought was her best tennis of 2015 in finishing off Caroline Wozniacki 6-1, 3-6, 6-3. Over the last three games especially, her ball-striking was clean and authoritative; Wozniacki, who beat her at the U.S. Open last year, had no answers.

We’ll see if Sharapova can keep it up in Madrid and beyond, but she looks like she’s settling in on clay again.

“If you’re mentally strong, sometimes things click,” Sharapova said, “and then on to the next match and all of a sudden your game is there and all of a sudden your movement is there.”

“Obviously if you play on the baseline, [it] makes it harder towards the end of sets.”

This was Roger Federer’s answer when he was asked, for some reason, if there had been a lot of bad bounces in his loss to Nick Kyrgios. His answer was no, but was there something Freudian about the phrase, “if you play on the baseline”? Was Federer hinting that he shouldn’t have been playing on the baseline quite so much?

Federer came to the net 26 times in his three-tiebreaker defeat; that was seven more times than his opponent, but it was still a modest sum for him in a match that long. Granted, this was clay. Granted, he hadn’t had much prep time in Madrid after playing in Istanbul. And granted, the points against Kyrgios were short. Yet I was amazed to hear a Tennis Channel commentator note that as of late in the third set, Federer had yet to chip and charge once in the match. Kyrgios does a good job of mixing up his second serve, but his two-handed backhand is vulnerable under pressure. Federer is never going to be a caution-to-the-wind net-rusher on clay, but the chip-and-charge is a tactic that he has had success with while working with Stefan Edberg over the last year and a half, and one that he shouldn't abandon on clay this spring.

As for Kyrgios, he followed his big win over Federer with a somewhat puzzling defeat to John Isner. It almost seemed, when he walked onto one of the smaller side courts with his pink headphones over his ears, as if the stage wasn’t big enough for him. And while he saved a match point in the second set against Isner, he threw away the next one he faced in the third with a wild double fault. The intense calm and self-assurance Kyrgios showed down the stretch against Federer weren’t in evidence this time.

Maybe he was tired. Maybe he had a letdown. Maybe Isner’s style wore on him mentally. All of those things would be understandable. Whatever the reason, Kyrgios’s biggest area of improvement in the future is obviously not learning how to win the big match. It’s learning how to win the next match, and the one after that.

Cutting back on the schedule in Santana is obviously not on the table for 2015. All four men’s quarterfinals and both women’s semis will be crammed in there on Friday. It makes for a very nice day or tennis; hopefully it doesn’t turn into two days. (See the Order of Play here.)

Was the high-quality ball-striking that Sharapova produced against Wozniacki a one-time thing, or is it here to stay for a while? If she can sustain anything close to that level, she should take care of Kuznetsova, who will be running on fumes, and will likely be shocked to be playing at 11:00 A.M. instead of P.M. Sharapova leads their head to head 8-4 and has won the last four. Winner: Sharapova

This is a slugger’s special that many of us having been waiting to see—including Serena herself, who said she was hoping to find out how her game matched up against Kvitova’s. They haven’t faced each other since 2013, and the match they played that year in Doha was a doozy that went the distance. Still, Serena’s game has matched up well enough with Petra’s in the past: She’s 5-0 against her. Winner: S. Williams

Neither has had a great year, but each has shown signs of improvement in Madrid. Nadal has been vamosing irresponsibly in his two wins, while Dimitrov hung on for a three-set victory over Stan Wawrinka on Thursday. Dimitrov and his versatile forehand have troubled Rafa in the past, including on clay, but Nadal has won all five of their matches so far. The setting inside Santana would seem to bode well for win number six. Winner: Nadal

Isner sounded slightly in awe of Berdych’s game in a post-match interview on Thursday, and I guess you can see why: He has lost four straight matches, and nine straight sets, to the Czech dating back to 2012. More amazing, Berdych hasn’t had to go a tiebreaker in any of them. But this is a different Isner, one who says that as long as he doesn’t let himself get frustrated, “I can beat anyone.” I might consider picking the American, who says he likes the fast conditions in Madrid, to win this one, if I hadn’t picked Berdych to make the semis at the start of the tournament. Winner: Berdych

Tough call. Raonic has a 3-2 record against Murray, he won their only meeting on clay, in Barcelona in 2012, and he hasn’t had to stay up until 3:00 A.M. to finish a match this week. But Murray seems to be thriving on the challenge, and the injustice of it all. Winner: Murray

It’s good this isn’t three-out-of-five sets, or they really might be out there all night. As it is, these two faced off four times in 2014, and all four went the distance before Nishikori won. But that wasn’t enough to throw Ferrer off the scent; he turned the tables in their last meeting, in Acapulco in March. There’s a fair amount on the line here, including a possible Masters title in Madrid and a seeding boost in Paris. Winner: Nishikori