James Blake's return to court comes to a crashing halt

(This is an old post that I posted on The Daily Forehand)

It's not often that matches make me feel an inner rage inside of me, but I feel that James Blake brings out that kind of emotion out of me more so than other players. I don't know how many people caught his opening round match against Igor Kunitsyn, but it could really be described as nothing other than a trainwreck of a match. At first, I thought I should cut him some slack. He's been off the tour for a while, hasn't played a match since Wimbledon and has had a few niggling injuries. He obviously hasn't had a whole lot of match practice, so why should I be criticising his performance as if he should do well straight off the blocks?

The early signs were okay. He broke Kunitsyn's serve straight off the bat, with the kind of trademark second serve returns that we've come to expect from him. Kunitsyn looked like a lightweight, as I grumbled at the potential one-sidedness of the encounter to the extent, where Blake didn't really need to bring anything close to his A-game.

But then Kunitsyn broke back quickly with some decent returns and good play. Maybe he's not so bad after all. His serve looked weak and lacking in pace, but on the other hand, it's deceptive. It floats up high, but it's accurate and deep especially going out wide to the corners. Blake just seemed rusty to me initially, struggling on the return of serves and snatching at times on his groundstrokes, but nothing to get overly frustrated about.

You see, it's not the slight inconsistencies that bother me. His whole body language and attitude during most of this match drives me insane. I'm watching the errors he's making late in the first set, and he's got his feet wide apart, open stance and trying to hit all these big shots while barely even moving his feet. In between points, he's got his shoulders slumped and he's walking slow in between points.

I don't like to call it this, but it looks like he's moping. I can't explain this mentality in any other way, other than the fact that he didn't want to be out there. And maybe Blake is one of those players. He only likes it when he's playing well. He can't really be bothered on those other days, which is crazy sometimes when you look at what he can do when he just decides to use his speed. Take for example, the second set tie-break. Suddenly he's decided that he wants it more and is going to decide to cover all of the court. Why couldn't he have done that earlier? I can't say what happened in the third set because as much as I would have loved to report on the match, I could not watch it any longer but I've heard that it was played at a similar quality.

Kunitsyn played a part too in this "special" match. Not that you could hold it against him, not only because of his status as a player but because he competed well. He stayed calm and collected, and played with a workmanlike attitude which is all you can ask for. Though both players did their fair share of gifting each other points, which got a little ridiculous. Kunitsyn was up 0-40 on Blake's serve at 5-5 in the second set, but shanked and showed no control over his shots to blow that advantage. At least in the end, it was good that the better competitor prevailed.