The shadows mottled the court and gave it a spectacularly textured appearance. What fans remained were tired, huddled together against the chill and determined to stick it out through the final quarterfinal of the day at the Monte Carlo Country Club. Here and there, someone yawned. And they all got a match worthy of the played-out atmosphere.
Gilles Simon, seeded no. 9 in this Masters event, had never been to the semifinal in a clay-court Masters. Neither had his opponent, no. 4 seed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. For a while, it looked like neither of them would make it and at times it seemed like neither deserved it.
But there's always a winner in tennis, and the winner of this Super Bowl of lethargy, this World Cup of Out-of-it-ness, was Simon. He improved his record against his good pal and countryman Tsonga to 4-2 with a sloppy but never interesting 7-5, 6-4 win.
You think I exaggerate.
On the final changeover of the first set, after Simon had squandered a two-break lead and played simply horrible service game to be broken for 5-all, he called for the trainer. The court-side microphones picked him up complaining about lethargy; I'm not sure what the French word is for "spacey" but he probably used that one, too.
Barely 40 minutes later, Simon was finishing off a run that won him 20 of the final 23 points of the match, while Tsonga was busy throwing in some of the most ill-considered drop shots and ugly service returns seen on this historic court. It's a good thing they sweep the courts to erase all the evidence, right?
But while it's fun to try to articulate just how lousy this match was, it doesn't do justice to the way Simon - lovingly known to his French compatriots as "little chicken" (which makes you wonder what his detractors call him) - fought off one of those weird spells everyone undergoes to knock off Tsonga - the guy who presently has a faux hawk that so resembles the comb that you could call him the "big rooster."
It was Tsonga who drew first blood in the "I wish I were anywhere but here" derby. He barely shuffled his feet and generally failed to get out of his own way as he opened the ball by giving up two breaks - a 12-2 run of points for Simon.
But Simon began to swoon by the fourth game, and gave back one of those breaks. Both men briefly rose above their disinterest over the next few games, but then Simon played that world-class stinker that made it 5-all. My notes say at least three but probably four of the points were unforced errors by Simon.
That's when the anti-momentum shifted again. Tsonga started the 5-all game with a double fault and finished it, after falling behind 15-40, with an inside-out forehand error. It was just one of his 43 unforced errors, and on this occasion he didn't have a pile of winners to even things up (he had just 16 for the match). From 6-5, Simon served out the first set with no trouble.
In the second set, it was Tsonga's turn to roar out to a 3-0 lead, but in his case it contained just one break. He lapsed almost immediately, and when he fell behind 0-40 in the fifth game, it looked like Simon would level it. But the lower-ranked of the Frenchmen threw in some wild shots and errors to allow Tsonga to slip the hook. Simon soon had another chance, when Tsonga served for 5-3. This time, Simon converted his first break point thanks to a forehand flier by Tsonga.
Simon fired off four straight points to win the next game and level at 4-all. He pressed on with excellent discipline and opportunism to record another quick break and this time he served out the set- and match - without a glitch.
It's unlikely that Simon will ever look back on this one as a great win, but he's the first clay-court Masters 1000 semifinal of his career, and that ought to banish his ills and put the spring back in his step.
-- Pete Bodo