Going into the final set on Court Philippe 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 a 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 in building a 40-15 lead, the wheels fell off. Three deuces and three break points later, Baker 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 provides 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 with a crisp display 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. 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 down-the-line backhand, often with a cute bunny hop added as a kind of Gallic flourish, you had better brace for the worst. And when Simon 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 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 briefly. And he did.
At 1-1, Simon started things 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 many drop-shot winners he struck 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 only one service break, that game was critical in the grand scheme of things because it marked the point at which Simon's form began to dissolve. To that point, the Frenchman 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, 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 cross-court backhand wide to allow Simon to even it at 5-5. Eventually, the set went to a 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 with a drop shot, the second via inside-out forehand. Simon served up a double fault on the next point, and the 4-0 lead would be too much for him to overcome. Baker took 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 the fifth set, Baker made seven errors with his backhand up to the point when Simon broke him for 2-0. 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 the American itchy to step around and clock the forehand. That break sealed it. Baker became error-prone and he looked fatigued 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.