Wimbledon Crisis Center, Day 9

!Rafa_2By Rosangel Valenti, TW Contributing Editor

Good morning. As always, this is your place to gather and discuss or match-call today's tennis from Wimbledon. As we expect heavy traffic here today, we'd be grateful if you could keep the subject on tennis, and wait until the day's matches are over before going off-topic.

Daily Weather Report:

I have been outside this morning, and the weather, as expected, has changed overnight. There's low cloud cover, the atmosphere is sticky and oppressive, and I felt spots of rain. I'm a few miles from Wimbledon - and there, today's forecast is for heavy rain, with more sporadic showers to follow tomorrow. At Wimbledon, the BBC reports that play on the outside courts was suspended earlier on, and the covers are on the courts. There is hope that the rain will clear later on, however.

Some precipitation is also expected on Saturday, while men's finals day on Sunday could see a  considerable downpour.

Player of the Day:

Wildcard Zheng Jie, after eliminating top seed Ana Ivanovic earlier in the tournament, has gone on to back up her performance, and reached her first Wimbledon singles semifinal by defeating number eighteen seed Nicole Vaidisova in three sets.

Match of the Day:

Three of the men's quarterfinals look interesting -  Roger Federer versus Mario Ancic, Feliciano Lopez up against Marat Safin, and, of course, Andy Murray's clash with Rafael Nadal. The latter in theory should be the match of the day - both have been playing well so far in the tournament, and the public will be largely behind Murray after his comeback against Richard Gasquet on Monday. The two have played twice before on hard courts, and Nadal won both encounters - however, the match at last year's Australian Open went to five sets. The second encounter, in Madrid late last year, took place in front of Nadal's home crowd, and although he won in straight sets, the match was very tight, and full of exciting shotmaking. Of the live matches I attended last year, this was the one I found most exciting to watch. In Hamburg, the two played on clay earlier this year, and the match, predictably, was won by Nadal.

Meanwhile, Mario Ancic was the last player to defeat Roger Federer at Wimbledon, in their first-ever encounter, but this happened in 2002, and since then Federer has defeated Ancic five times, including in a Wimbledon quarterfinal in 2006, in straight sets. This match is due first on Centre Court.

Feliciano Lopez has a 4-1 head-to-head against Marat Safin, including a straight-sets defeat at Wimbledon in the round of 32 in 2006, and I think he goes into this match as the favourite, notwithstanding Safin's defeat of Novak Djokovic last week. The last time that Safin won five matches in a row was at the 2005 Australian Open, where he went on to be the champion.

Rainer Schuettler plays Arnaud Clement in the other quarterfinal, and leads their head-to-head 4-1, including a win at this year's Autralian Open. The world number 94 and number 145 respectively have come through the quarter that contained Nikolay Davydenko and Andy Roddick, and it's fair to say that neither was expected to get this far.

Today's Pictures:

I took these on Court 1 on Monday.

As always, enjoy today's tennis.