The night before my Madrid trip, the first thing I did when I got home was locate my passport, and place it in a pocket of my green camera bag. I also went through the checklist - tickets, camera batteries....everything I needed to make the experience run smoothly. I had to be up at 3.30am to make the 6am flight from Heathrow, so went to sleep content in the knowledge that all was well with my planning.
My taxi arrived on time, at 4.15am, and I hefted my bag into the back seat. Then I asked the taxi driver to wait a second, as I wanted to double-check that passport and tickets were all there. No passport. Not anywhere.
I emptied the entire contents of my bag on the back seat of the taxi, scoured my (extremely untidy) front entrance hall where the bag had been, and got out an industrial-strength torch to look at the pavement between my front door and the street in case the offending passport had fallen out there. Nothing. At 5am, I sent the taxi away. I'm sure the driver didn't believe that I had put the passport in the pocket of my bag. Not unless he also believed in poltergeists.
I kept on searching - everywhere I'd been the night before in the house, all the pockets of the clothes I'd been wearing, even going through the rubbish bin in case I'd thrown the passport away by mistake. While all this was happening, I was making contingency plans to go to the passport office and get a replacement so as to leave for Madrid later in the day. I also had several other bags in the entrance hall, and emptied all of them out. Zilch emerged.
There was one I must have gone through ten times, thinking I could have mistaken the bag for my camera bag - a green rucksack with an outside pocket, with a Wimbledon 2007 logo on it - Pete had acquired it somehow during Wimbledon, and passed it on, so I'd been using it daily. At 7.30 am, I discovered that the rucksack had an extra external pocket, on the back, under the straps. I hadn't known it was there. And in it sat my passport.
So at 9am, I finally got on a flight to Madrid, from Gatwick, safe in the knowledge that however late I was, the fifth leg of my "Rafa 12-month Euro-Event Sweep" was still achievable.
I eventually arrived at the Arena Rockódromo at the Casa de Campo in time to see Juan Carlos Ferrero beat Carlos Moya. Watching indoor tennis when it's hot outdoors is one of the stranger experiences I've had this tennis year. The venue seats about 10,000 people, and is used for various purposes including theatre and live music - it was, however, partly designed with the tennis Masters Series event in mind. If I hadn't known that it was only completed in 2004, I would have thought it was a lot older. It's all glass, steel and concrete - there's definitely a feeling of retro functionality about it. I recall that the roof leaked during last year's event, which isn't exactly reassuring. As far as I can tell, the circular mass of steel above the arena hosts not only the visible fluorescent lighting, but also contains projectors which provide the moving adverts that are seen on the sides of the court.
One area where the venue scores well is its seating - outdoor venues tend to have hard plastic seats, but these seats are cushioned, with plenty of leg room, and each row is high enough behind the one in front that there are no obstructions (other people's heads) to bother any spectator. The seats in the raspberry-red boxes that you see at the front of the court are exactly the same as all the others. In fact, when you see the boxes from behind (I was directly above the box area) there isn't much that's glamorous about them. They are divided from the other seating with bare metal barriers, and, oddly, have what look like single white lilies of some kind wired at their corners - I don't know whether these are real flowers or paper ones. Of course, during the weekday day sessions, most of the boxes are empty.
Apart from the two night sessions involving Nadal matches, the hall was never completely full, and always noisy. People chatter continuously during the matches, but there's so much background noise that it doesn't matter. It drifts in from outside the arena, which is encircled by a vast glass and concrete access corridor which is usually well-populated with people wandering around, including, on one day, a large group of high-volume schoolchildren. During the day, the big windows also allow plenty of natural light to filter into the arena from the sides. However, there are still some odd multiple shadow effects on the court due to the spotlights - more pronounced at night, when all the lighting is internal.
Not everything went smoothly. On the first day, Fernando Verdasco's three-setter with Novak Djokovic caused the day session to spill over, well into the start of the night session, which is scheduled to begin at 8pm, with the doors opening at 7pm. At 8pm, there were still large crowds of annoyed people outside the venue. To add to the chaos, after the day session ends, the organisers insist that everyone leaves the arena, which means that anyone with a night session ticket also has to go out and come back in - not out of the front entrance, as that is blocked by the queues, but via some circuitous downstairs passage. Not so easy to negotiate with a fractured foot (healing nicely, but still sore) and two heavy cameras.
Apparently this is all done so that the organisers can perform security checks between the sessions (I was told that they bring in the police with sniffer dogs, as notables including members of the Royal Family are often present for the night sessions). One thing they don't appear to do do between sessions, however, is cleaning the seating area - for example, there was a piece of chewing-gum squashed on the floor near where I was seated on the first day, and it was still there during the next day's night session.
On the second day, David Nalbandian dispatched Juan Martin Del Potro early enough that there was a gap between the day and night sessions. By the way, in person, Del Potro looked unbelievably tall and thin next to Nalbandian, when they embraced with what looked like very genuine friendliness at the net. The gap left between sessions was in fact long enough for Stefan Koubek to come on and practise before his night match against Feliciano Lopez. His practise partner was David Ferrer, who had already exited the tournament. Security tried to throw me out, but I refused to move until the last. An obviously injured foot and lack of ability in Spanish have their uses.
