By TW Contributing Editor Andrew Burton
The rain in Toronto has been a talking point this summer. It's played a bit part in this tournament, and it made an early appearance in the first SF match of the day. The two men played one point, then had to stop. When Mohamed Layhani asked them to resume play, Gilles Simon was reluctant, and after conversation across the net with his opponent, Nicolas Kiefer, and more checking of the surface by Layhani, the drops began to fall more heavily, forcing an hour's delay.
A Simon-Kiefer SF wasn't, I suspect, in most people's brackets coming into the tournament. Rather glibly, in an earlier post I wrote that Simon was the leader in the ATP US Open Series after his win in Indianapolis, but not for long. But this SF spot guaranteed that he'd be the leader for at least another week, along with a slot in the top 16, giving him (I think) a top 16 seeding at the US Open.
When play resumed, Kiefer began more aggressively than his opponent, and was rewarded with an early break. With his new, shorter hairstyle, Kiefer no longer looks like a guitarist in a German 1980s heavy metal band: I'm at a loss to say who he does look like, until Kamakshi Tandon nails it - Colin Farrell.
The two men traded breaks from 4-3 to 5-5, and we went to a first set TB. The decisive point of the set turned out to be one of Simon's signature shots, a running 2H BH passing shot which gave him a 6-4 lead.
If this match report comes across as "one thing happened, then another," well, I have to say that early on it was hard to find a way to really get engaged in the match. We'd had two pretty solid scraps the night before, Murray-Djokovic and Nadal-Gasquet. The first set TB between Nadal and Gasquet may have had its share of errors and flubs, but both players were attacking the ball, and the sold out crowd was completely engaged in the match. Today, the majority of the points elicited polite applause, but I didn't have any sense that substantial sections of the crowd were rooting for either player to win.
Sometimes you get matches between two less well known players which pull you in because of the verve and style shown by the combatants. Today didn't seem like it was going to be one of those days. Kiefer made the sole break of the second set stand up, to the kind of applause that an English county cricket ground gives a spinner who's bowled a maiden against a batsman padding up just before tea time.
If you play tennis, there's a drill that you can employ to measure your consistency with a coach or partner. Begin play at the baseline, and attempt to hit twenty balls in succession during a rally into the far box beyond the service lines. Add one for each time the ball lands in the box, subtract one if the ball goes into the net, lands short or goes out.
I call the professional version of this "box tennis." You can make a pretty good living if you can keep the ball deep enough for long enough, outwaiting your opponent. It's an absolutely honorable strategy, but it's very hard to get excited watching it, even when it's executed as well as Gilles Simon shows it can be done.
I was standing next to Kamakshi Tandon as Simon broke in the third set to even the score at 4-4. I said "I can appreciate the skill being shown, but to me it comes across as white rice." Kamakshi thought for a second and said, "more like bread and butter." Either way, the match to this point had been nutritious but not exactly tasty. Then all of a sudden it began to fizz.
Simon held, then botched an opportunity to go ahead at 15-15 on Kiefer's serve with the kind of overhead I make - into the net. The match was approaching the 3 hour mark, and the points were getting better - still long probing exchanges trying to create a tiny chink, but the attempted clinching winners were now going in, not missing by a couple of inches.
At 2-0 Kiefer in the TB, we had the point of the match - a breathtaking rally where Simon recovered a DS, then Kiefer forced his way back to the net and hit an angled BH volley past Simon's despairing racquet. Simon was some 15 feet away, having lobbed his racquet at the obvious winner. Now, surely, he was done. Not so; from a 5-2 deficit, Simon climbed back to 5-5, but could do nothing with a powerful Kiefer serve. The final rally was emblematic of the match as a whole: a probing baseline rally, then a Kiefer drop shot. Simon made the ground, but Kiefer chip-lobbed his response, and Simon's attempted BH OH volley sailed out. Both men dropped to their knees.
After the match, Simon was as charming in defeat at his press conference as he'd been all week in victory. When asked if he knew about the Cincinnati draw, he smiled and said "ah yes - the revenge." Was he going to have a party now his run was over and he could enjoy the nine victory streak? Another smile - "not now, because I'm too professional."
If you want an example of the expression "leaving nothing out on the court," check out the final set tie break. It took us a while to get here - it certainly wasn't ugly, but neither could you have described the first 34 games of the match high level tennis. No matter. At the death, Gilles Simon and Nicholas Kiefer took good bread and butter and turned it into a small feast.