Going into the final set on Court Philipp Chatrier today, Gilles Simon was 7-5 in five set matches over the length of his career.
Good, if not great.
But it was more to go on than the record of his opponent, Brian Baker. The 27-year old American human-interest story had never played a five-set match, not least because he missed almost all of what would be called his career with that well-documented string of horrific injuries.
Baker's unfamiliarity with fifth set territory was manifest quickly. Simon held the first game of the final act, and Baker got off to a decent start in his next service game.
But after using his serve to good effect to build a 40-15 lead, the wheels fell off. Three deuces and three break points later he yielded the game. Fatigued as well as dispirited he was broken again after a Simon hold and the rout was on. The final score, in Simon's favor, was 6-4, 6-1, 6-7 (4), 1-6, 6-0.
The rhomboidal score provide a fairly accurate picture of the match. Simon secured the first set (after an early exchange of service breaks) in the ninth game and served it out at 5-4 with a crisp game that ended with a pair of aces.
Simon struck the first painful blow in the second set as well, breaking Baker for a 2-1 lead with serve to come. The match was getting away from Baker, but it was through no great fault of his own. When Simon, not exactly a howitzer, serves back-to-back aces to win a set you know something is up (he would, in fact, have a career day at the notch, unloading 15 aces), and when he's dialed in on that backhand down-the-line, often with the cute bunny hope added as a kind of Gallic flourish, you had better brace for the worst. And when he begins to run around his backhand to blast whistling forehand service returns it might be time to just take cover and hope the storm passes.
Doing all those neat things, Simon roared through the second set. Yet while it takes some storms longer to pass than it does others, eventually all of them do. The question going into the third set was whether Baker had the game and the determination to halt and perhaps even reverse the slide. Given that Cinderella stories of the kind he's written in the past few months don't generally end in anti-climax, it was a good bet that he might rally to make something good happen, even if it was briefly. And he did.
Simon started the third game of set 3 (with the score 1-1) with an ace, but Baker got his teeth into the game and would not let go. From deuce, Baker played a fine chip-and-charge point off a second serve to force a backhand error, and he earned the break with one of the many drop shot winners he hit on the day. I wish I knew just how many of those he hit and how many were successful (the vast majority, I'm sure), not least because Simon is one of the most nimble players out there.
While a break, that game was critical in the grand scheme of things only because it marked the point at which Simon's form began to dissolve. To that point, he had been extremely aggressive, accurate and bold; after it, at least until the fifth set, he was less forward-thinking, at times careless, and increasingly peevish. That's the thing with Simon; the same mercurial quality that makes him so dangerous sometimes causes him to become disgruntled. That was in stark contrast to Baker, whose composure and cool manner at every stage of the match was striking.
Baker held that slim one-break lead in the third until the 10th game, in which served for the set at 5-4. At 15-30 in that game, the men engaged in a long rally distinguished by Simon's terrific defense, which paid off with a forehand error by Baker that set up two break points. Baker fought off the first one, but then hit a crosscourt backhand wide to allow Simon to even it at 5-5. Eventually, the set went to the tiebreaker.
Simon looked tight when he made a backhand error on the first point of the tiebreaker, and Baker was poised as he won his two serves with a pair of contrasting winners - the first a drop shot, the second an inside-out forehand. Simon served up a double fault on the next point and the 4-0 lead would be too much for Simon to overcome. Baker swept the tiebreaker , 7-4.
In a curious role reversal, Simon lost the fourth set as badly as Baker had lost the second. But he was no less capable of recovering his poise. Which brings us to that key second game in the fifth set, served by Baker.
Counting the last two points of the first game of that set, Baker made seven errors with his backhand up to the point where Simon broke him for 2-0. Now this was truly weird, because Baker's two-handed backhand is extremely solid, a thing of compact beauty. How it could break down so completely is a mystery to me.
But break down it did, and Simon took full advantage. The last point of that second game was decided in a 27 shot rally when Baker drove a forehand long - after a seemingly endless backhand-t0-backhand series of shots seemed to make Baker itchy to step around and clock the forehand.
That break sealed it. Baker became error-prone and he lookedd fatigue after that, but credit Simon for keeping the pressure on, and looking as fresh as he had way back in the first set. Simon may be a man of ever-changeable moods, but the one thing you can't do is wear him out. And certainly not when the fifth set represents entirely uncharted territory.
- Pete Bodo