By 10:00 this morning, after a week spent watching every match from the Shanghai Masters, I officially felt like I was in two places at once. Familiar sounds from the tournament—Andy Murray screaming, Mohamed Lahyani booming, the crowd oohing and aahing in the middle of points—blended perfectly with the familiar sights and sounds of New Brooklyn. These were, among others: Children at recess screaming, construction crews booming, and locals oohing and aahing as Norah Jones—yes, that Norah Jones; don't tell me you haven't been glued to the saga of Windowgate—walked her dog down the street. I fully expect her to be at the corner bar this Sunday eating wings and watching the NFL with the rest of us.
Meanwhile, as soon as I started to talk about the rise of the volley in Shanghai, Andy Roddick and David Ferrer spent three sets and two hours this morning making it disappear again. And it mostly stayed away through the four quarterfinals on Friday. Here’s what else caught my sometimes-sleepy eyes.
I wish I had something, an observation, a joke, a pithy remark, an insult, to bring to Ferrer’s third-set tiebreaker win over Roddick, but I don’t. Or, at least nothing that hasn’t been said many, many times before. Ferrer keeps grinding no matter what—this was the second straight day in which he came back after dropping the first set—while Roddick’s approach shot, especially his slice backhand approach, always lands short. That’s a killer against Ferrer. But as close as this match was, what was most notable to me was how many potential turning points came and went, and nothing turned until the very end, when Ferrer got a mini-break for 4-2 in the third-set breaker.
My only potentially original thought had to do with Hawk-Eye. Early on, Ferrer hit a serve that was called long but was close. He took the slightly odd step of asking Roddick what he thought—the two players have the same management, so maybe the Spaniard thought he could trust the American. Roddick said he wasn’t sure, Ferrer challenged, and it turned out that the ball had indeed been long. I wondered about the ethics of one player, in another situation, subtly, non-verbally tricking an opponent into thinking he should challenge (not that Roddick did anything like this), and thereby getting him to waste one (Ferrer was reckless enough with his challenges today to run out of them in the third set). Maybe the player would take an extra-long look at the call, even if he knew it was correct. This would certainly be within the sporting code of, say, baseball, and part of me likes the head game aspect of it. But it’s not tennis.
In all of the matches played this week, the best tennis I've seen was produced by Kei Nishikori in his straight-set dismantling of Alexandr Dolgopolov today. It was a clinic in contemporary baseline tennis, without ever seeming clinical. Nishikori did all of those seemingly simple things that really aren’t so simple when the other guy is trying to do them to you at the same time. He controlled the center of the court. He hit the ball where Dolgopolov wasn’t. There was nothing risky or fancy about it, but also nothing conservative about it either. Nishikori saw a weakness, Dolgopolov’s backhand pass, and he went after it. And he was confident enough, after his fine week of tennis, to save six break points in the first set. When Nishikori served for it at 5-4, he went down 0-30. From there, he made four straight first serves to four different spots and came back to hold. Dolgopolov is usually the crowd-pleaser, but anyone who likes purposeful tennis had to like Nishikori today.
Tennis, as Florian Mayer found out the hard way today, is a game of New Days. Nothing is quite the same as it was the last time you went out there. Yesterday, in his win over Rafael Nadal, Mayer’s serves landed on the lines and his drop shots dropped a few inches over the net. His backhand volleys went in and his topspin forehands landed deep and bounced high. From the beginning of his match today against Feliciano Lopez, a man five leagues below Nadal, it was clear that none of those things were going to happen again for Mayer. And it wasn't just his bad cough or sickly look that clued you in.
Serving at 2-3, he stopped in the middle of a crucial point to challenge an in call on the baseline, only to find out that the ball really had been in. Mayer then made a bad backhand error to be broken. Later, on an easy forehand, he let the ball drop out of his strike zone and shanked it wide. Yesterday it wouldn’t have mattered, he would have made the shot anyway.
We’ve accused Grigor Dimitrov of copying Roger Federer’s style, but it really does make sense to copy the best. Copying Richard Gasquet is a riskier proposition. That’s what, at first glance, it appeared that Australia’s Matthew Ebden had decided to do. The backwards white baseball cap and the wide stance for ground strokes made him look like a Gasquet impersonator. That was, until he hit the ball. Ebden is much more of a meat and potatoes aggressive baseliner, with none of the mercurial, occasional genius of Gasquet. And probably little of the disappointment that always comes with that genius, either.
Ebden did what he could against Andy Murray today, and did what he could to keep the weeklong net-rushing renaissance alive. But it wasn’t nearly enough, as the much steadier Scot sat back and pierced those attacks with his usual passing-shot brilliance. On the surface, this was an easy one for Murray, but two questions came to my mind while watching it.
First, why did he have a fit over one missed shot in the third game of the match? It was 1-all, 30-30 with Ebden serving when Murray missed a makeable return. He immediately yelled something, stared toward his box with that blind-man-raging look he gets, pointed his index finger in the air—“Oh no, I didn’t!”—and finally decided that the whole thing was “------- unbelievable.” I can only imagine that Murray felt a certain amount of extra pressure to beat a player he should obviously beat. Either that, or he’s about to snap once and for all.
Second question: It’s much easier said than done, but isn’t this the type of match where Murray should get habituated to the more aggressive style of play that he’ll need in the later rounds of most tournaments? Like Andy Roddick, Murray does what comes naturally early in an event; both of them play safely because they know that safe will win. Then they suddenly find themselves in a match where safe won’t win, and it’s hard to adjust. Aggressive play is now out of their comfort zone.
We'll see what Murray is comfortable doing in the semis, where he gets Nishikori, and Lopez gets Ferrer. With all due respect to the nation of Spain, it’s the former that I’m looking forward to watching tomorrow in my personal Shanghai-Brooklyn dual universe. Enjoy the weekend. I’ll be back with a post on the final.