Gilles Simon, who appeared to suffer a bad ankle injury at the Kooyong exhibition last Saturday and nearly pulled out of the Australian Open, said he got lucky in his 6-7 (4), 6-4, 3-6, 6-3, 16-14 victory over Daniel Brands in the first round, even though the contest lasted four hours and 22 minutes.
“It's always a tough decision to make, the 18th seed said. “Like you go, and I think this time I got pretty lucky. Maybe you can just lose 2-1-1, and have a different feeling at the end. It's not easy that everybody saw me with the crutches. If I just go and I'm ridiculous, I guess no one's going to talk good about me.”
The Frenchman added that he was not playing pain-free, and after he was broken in the third game he thought he was in trouble.
“Finally he got tight and I think I used it very good,” Simon said. “I played a lot of serve and volley. I felt I couldn't run from the baseline, so I was trying to keep it short to break to rhythm, to give no rhythm to this match. The conditions helps, because when it's [105] degrees you just miss everything because everybody is so slow. I just managed to play relaxed. Then I got lucky because I think he could win this match 15 times. So he was in a really bad situation playing someone very relaxed. He knew he had everything in his hand and he had many occasion. Finally he lost this match. He must feel pretty sad now.”