Roland Garros Crisis Center, Day 4

By Rosangel Valenti, TW Contributing Editor

Good morning. This is today's post for discussing events at Roland Garros, whether involving balls hitting racquets, or raindrops hitting covers. Today's schedule can be found here.

I made the trip from London to Paris yesterday, and spent the day at Stade Roland Garros, much of it in the company of MarieJ, her sister Isabelle, and her father. One thing left all of us mightily unimpressed - the bizarre ineptitude of the tournament organisers in handling rain delays that had been foretold well beforehand. After the Mauresmo-Savchuk match was stopped on Court Philippe Chatrier yesterday afternoon, there was a short period of heavy rain. After this tailed off, spectators were left to sit staring at a covered court for well over an hour, while nobody made any attempt to do anything to restart play.

Not surprisingly, the crowd were expectant that play would get going again, and as time wore on, there were chants, slow-handclaps, boos, whistles and catcalls aplenty. I didn't see a single court official emerge during this time (perhaps fearing being lynched the longer this went on), and, unforgiveably, no public announcement was made to spectators about what to expect.

Eventually, a tiny squad of five men appeared, and painstakingly swept the water off the covers into the court drainage areas at either end. It took them ten minutes to sweep each side. Did no-one bother to calculate how fast it might have been had twenty court-sweepers been employed? And why doesn't Roland Garros invest in tents for its show courts, to keep the water running away from the court and eliminate the need for low-tech water removal? Given the surface, these probably wouldn't need to be anything like as elaborate as the massive tents at Wimbledon.

Just as the court-sweepers finished their task, down came the rains again. We calculated that if Roland Garros' handling of the rain delay had been worthy of a Grand Slam event, close to an extra hour's play, unbroken, could have been fitted in between showers. MarieJ, who has long experience of the outside courts at Roland Garros, tells me that there appear to be very few people involved in the "water removal" exercise, and that the "squads" would only reach the outside courts after dealing with the two main show courts. Tournament officials may say that more rain was predicted during the break - but not saying so to the public was an amateurish mistake. Plus, at an event of this size and prestige, there's no valid excuse for being understaffed, and not trying to get ahead and prepare the court during an extended dry spell.

Today's Match Choices:

Men - Gilles Simon versus Radek Stepanek. Incidentally, MarieJ tells me that the decision to schedule the bottom half of the men's draw to play first this year has much to do with the tournament activities of the various French players in the top half towards the end of last week.

Women - for the third day running, we await the encounter between Marion Bartoli and Casey Dellacqua. There's also an interesting second-round women's match scheduled last today on Court 1, between Lucie Safarova (who last year disposed of Amelie Mauresmo at this event) and Ana Ivanovic, but, naturally, it will be a bonus if it happens today.

Player of the Day:

Tough to nominate on a day when so little tennis was played. I saw the early stages of the Wawrinka-Kohlschreiber match, and Stan was a worthy winner. I think, however, that Mario Ancic's disposal of Hamburg semifinalist Andreas Seppi, 6-2, 7-2, 6-2, looks impressive.

Today's Pictures:

Amelie Mauresmo predictably takes three sets to dispose of Olga Savchuk. Regrettably, the meandering nature of this match and the brevity of what followed it mean that I'm unable to verify with certainty whether the green-clad figure in the lower picture is the tournament's only genuine lesser-spotted Defending Champion. Some typical behavioural characteristics were on display, however, so I still have hope.

Weather Report:

Yesterday morning, today's forecast was for sun - the only projected sunny day this week. However, today and the next four days, through to Sunday, are now expected to be plagued by "light showers".

I hope everyone enjoys whatever tennis manages to occur in between these, assuming that the tournament isn't experimenting to see whether it can generate pondlife over the fortnight in the pools collecting on its court covers.