Thursday, 27 June 2013
Fewer Waves at Wimbledon as chat turn to Return of Serve-and-Volley
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Fewer Waves at Wimbledon as chat turn to Return of Serve-and-Volley
Serena Williams, the most
wanted and the defensive champion in women’s singles, roll to her 33rd straight
conquest on Thursday
.
WIMBLEDON,
England — in the direction of the within the gates of the All England Club on
Thursday morning, you probable to see something, anything, that would reproduce
the strange and earth-shattering events of the day earlier than
But there was nothing: no plaque
being hammered onto a green wall to commemorate a wild Wednesday; no
upset-shocked victims receiving treatment; no orange-soled shoes visible inside
what the British call a dustbin.
Instead,
order had been restored at Wimbledon even if Roger Federer, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga
and Victoria Azarenka were no longer around to appreciate the amenities, and
even if Maria Sharapova was lynching around only to watch her boyfriend, Grigor
Dimitrov, dig deep into a fifth set before rain insolvent the expectation for
the night.
Thud
Thursday still featured a few more slips on the slick paddock, as well as two
more retirements — from the veteran Frenchmen Michael Llodra and Paul-Henri
Mathieu — that bring the tournament total to 12 after two rounds.
But there
was no sign of Wednesday’s electrical energy, the sense of occasion that made
stars feel helpless and outsiders feel as if this day simply had to be the day
they could crash the gathering.
By early
afternoon Thursday, it became apparent that for all the upsets and the
superlatives — the 81-year-old coach Nick Bollettieri called Wednesday “easily
the craziest day of tennis I have ever seen” — Wimbledon had not been kick that
far off the rails after all.
Although
Rafael Nadal and the defending champion, Federer, are out after two rounds, the
No. 1 seed, Novak Djokovic, and No. 2 Andy Murray have yet to lose a set.
Djokovic advanced on Thursday with a 7-6 (2), 6-3, 6-1 victory over Bobby
Reynolds, a 30-year-old American qualifier whose removal left the United States
with no men in the third round in singles for the first time since 1912 (when
no American men played at all).
As for the
women’s draw, Serena Williams, the overwhelming favorite and defending
champion, remains hale and hearty. She underscored the pecking order with a
6-3, 6-2 victory over Caroline Garcia, 19, of France who confessed that
Wednesday had given her, however briefly, a little more zip in her step.
“It does
give you ideas,” she said.
But Williams
had other ones, and she said she followed the tumult directly.
“The first
thing I do is, I’m like, ‘O.K., Serena, stay focused,’ ” she said. “This
happened before. I don’t know when. I want to say it was the U.S. Open, though.
A lot of players were losing. I thought, definitely want to stay focused and
stay serious. So that’s what I did again yesterday.”
Garcia lifts
her eyes to the sky well before she tosses up the ball to serve, and it
ultimately seemed like a fine idea to seek help from above in light of
Williams’s current form. Williams rolled to her 33rd straight victory and has
also won 28 straight sets, which meant that after all the drama-tinged news
conferences and pretournament public apologies, she could settle into a much
more cheerful vein on Thursday.
It included
a debate about a would-be battle of the sexes with Murray.
Opening
question: “Andy Murray has challenged you to a argument in Las Vegas. What is
your answer?”
Williams:
“He’s challenge me?”
That led to debate
of Williams’s long-ago match (and defeat) against the cigarette-smoking German
journeyman Karsten Braasch in Australia in 1998.
“I was
really young; I’m a lot more experienced now,” Williams said, before taking
into consideration Murray.
“He’s
probably one of the top three people I definitely don’t want to play,” she
said. “But yeah, maybe we can have a little bit of a showdown. That would be
fine. I get alleys. He gets no serves. I get alleys on my serves, too. He gets
no legs. Yeah.”
Williams
will get the chance to feel young again in her next match, when she faces
Kimiko Date-Krumm, the enduring Japanese player who at nearly 43 is the oldest
woman in the Open era to advance to Wimbledon’s third round in singles.
The two have
never played, and if anyone can throw Williams off time, it is Date-Krumm, who
once almost chopped and changed tactics enough to knock the other five-time
Wimbledon champion in the Williams family (Venus) out of the singles.
“I did see
that match; I think I lost four years of my life watching that match, so I will
unquestionably be talking to Venus,” Serena Williams said.
But even as
Williams talked about the future, there was still plenty of talk about the past
(as in Wednesday); about Federer’s increasingly evident fade; and about the
revival (even if ephemeral) of the serve-and-volley style that has most of the
middle-age former stars on the grounds licking their chops with something that
could be called nostalgic expectancy.
“We all want
to see serve-and-volley back,” said Mats Wilander, 48, a former world No. 1
from Sweden.
It was back
in full, risk-taking flow on Wednesday on Centre Court as 116th-ranked Sergiy
Stakhovsky decided that the only way to nudge the odds in his favor was to
deprive Federer of time by following his serve to net, preferably after
delivering a hand round to his weaker backhand wing.
Such clarity
can help a tennis player. If you have just one legitimate option, sticking by
that option is the easiest path to take. The enormous surprise was that
Federer, even in his diminished 2013 state, could not find a way to solve the
riddle, and he will drop to No. 5 or worse in the rankings after the
tournament.
His probability
of winning an 18th Grand Slam singles title are not over, but his days of doing
it as the favorite certainly seem to be done. Federer, a seven-time Wimbledon
champion, still hit some brilliant shots, but he also hit too many shaky ones
to avoid putting an exclamation point on the long, flowing, Fitzgeraldian
sentence that was Wednesday.
Thursday was
much more well-matched to Hemingway even if it ended in typical English
fashion: underneath umbrellas.
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