Brisbane International - Wednesday Blog

It’s the start of play on Wednesday, and Florian Mayer and Richard Berankis have just walked out on court, along with the officials.  Mayer towers all over them, while Berankis fits in with the crowd of officials.  Berankis looks like a cute little junior, while Mayer looks mature.  Berankis had some headphones on in one ear, then I started to wonder which other players do the same thing.

Seeing his age, I thought to myself, maybe this would be a more difficult match than I originally thought.  After all, young players can make quick strides in the rankings.

I quickly tried to acquaint myself with Berankis’ game.  His groundstrokes look very technically sound, and he moves reasonably well, but not spectacularly.  He’s a good ball-striker, and his double-handed backhand is the standout shot.  Good ball strikers are always dangerous.

Mayer started off the match in aggressive fashion, not resorting to as many slow-paced shots as he did against Tomic.  Even without the obvious slow slice backhands, he was still able to change the pace and keep Berankis off-guard, and Berankis made too many errors to start with.  The biggest difference between the two though, was Mayer’s return of serve, which is definitely one of his biggest strengths when playing well.  He’s very good at using the opponent’s pace against them, by taking the return early and reflexing it back.

The other factor that made Mayer clearly the better player in the first set and a half was his superior counterpunching ability.  About midway into the first set, Berankis started to clean up his game, and Mayer couldn’t hit through him anymore.

The vast majority of winners must have been on the run from defensive positions.  It really made me think about how Mayer relies on his movement so much, to be able to hit those great angled crosscourt backhands and forehands on the run.  He has quite an aggressive way of moving his feet when he is hitting the shot.  It’s not a smooth way of moving, but rather a very abrupt way of suddenly planting his feet firmly into the right position.

The point of the tournament came on 5-4 in the first set, 0-15, where both players exchanged fast-paced, high quality groundstrokes for 20 strokes or so, which ended in a forehand approach shot into the open court that looked like it could have won the point, then a great passing shot from Berankis that looked like it could have won the point, and finally a dive volley winner from Mayer to get to 0-30 and eventually break for the set.  That entire game at 5-4 was high quality.  Mayer finished it off with a backhand return winner down-the-line.

This was a match of two halves.  The first set and a half, from where Mayer was up a set and 3-1, and then the rest of the match.  I noticed today from the crowd, that there seems to be an annoying trend of the underdog player on the outside courts getting more claps from the crowd.  It’s not really accurate, but I call it sympathy cheering.  It was the same in Marion Bartoli’s match, how the player expected to win can hit a great shot and the crowd will be silent, then the other player might win a point through an opponent’s error and then they get an encouraging round of applause.  But it doesn’t stop even when the underdog is winning.  The seeded player will still get no additional encouragement!  Of course, it doesn’t apply to the stars, and maybe also it had something to do with Berankis being young and decent looking.

Mayer had this match under control, up a set and 3-1, with his superior returning skills.  At 15-30 on his serve, there was a ball that dropped on the baseline that I thought he just left because he thought it was landing out.  But then on 15-40, he did it again, and this time it was not so close to the baseline.  He definitely had to be injured, and soon enough his body language completely changed.

It’s quite frustrating when you’re watching a match, and even though one player is winning, it looks likely that they won’t win.  Mayer had been relying on his movement the whole match, so I couldn’t see how he could finish this off.  Unless if his condition improved, or he served extremely well, or relied on his returns.  He sure hadn’t been able to smack that many winners, without doing some running beforehand.  Berankis didn’t really need to play any better.  Before this, every shot Mayer missed was close to the line, but now he was shanking it and hitting in the middle of the net.

This was frustrating for me to watch too, so I started snacking to distract myself.  So how did Mayer end up winning it in the end?  The third set was incredibly strange.  Mayer was visibly frustrated with himself, smacking a ball into the fence after holding serve in the first game, then later on in the set hitting his knee and holding it (when he started to make more of an effort to move for shots).  Maybe he started to move better, knowing that he was near the end of the match, and only had to keep it up for a short while.  Or either he felt a little better.  In any case, he was in a hurry to walk straight off the court when the match finished.

Berankis definitely had a part to play in this.  He pretty much gave away the final game, with one bad error and a double fault.  His game seemed to crumble in the key moments.  I guess some more experience is required for him in this area.

While this long and fluctuating match was going on, it seems like the people inside Pat Rafter Arena were getting short-changed.  I waited outside expecting to see some of Jelena Dokic’s match, but she had just lost 6-0 6-1, and they were already just about to start the 3rd match on the schedule - Andy Roddick’s match against Alexandr Dolgopolov.  This was a highly disappointing match.  I expected much more after seeing Dolgopolov’s match against Andreev.

Dolgopolov started off brightly, matching Roddick in the serving department and hitting superior groundstrokes.  He can hit the ball with astounding pace at times.  I suppose it looks spectacular when it works.  But it turns out he’s just a flashy ball-basher.  After that initial break of serve, Roddick’s service games became much simpler, while most of Dolgopolov’s shot selections seemed silly and over-the-top.  He made many wild errors, and so this became a simple match for Roddick, just for being the more sensible player. 

Roddick played solidly, but I really didn’t like the look of that slice backhand at times.  Then again I was sitting so far back in the stadium, I couldn’t really see properly how high it typically went over the net, but it seemed to float too much for me.

So my $60 ticket for Pat Rafter Arena was basically spent on that disappointing match.  It was back to the intimate and outside courts, where the only problem is that it can be unbearably hot, like it was on the second and third sets of the Mayer vs Berankis match.  By now, it had significantly cooled down though.

Marion Bartoli had just started her match against Iveta Benesova in steamrolling fashion.  I like to watch her relentless determination and killer instinct.  She has a deadly look about her, and takes a very serious approach to her tennis.  She also has entertaining routines in between points, sometimes practicing service motions in between points on her serve.

It’s a good thing that she plays in this way too, because she doesn’t look anywhere near as effective when she’s pulled out wide, like she was in the second set.  From what I saw today and yesterday, maybe she runs out of steam after the first set, not being able to play at the same relentless pace point after point.  But she picked it up again in the third set.

Benesova looked like she couldn’t quite understand how the match turned around against her so much in the third set.  She spent the second half of the set being grumpy, and seemed to get annoyed at the umpire for not being able to hear one of her overrules, and rambled on about something else.  Then the umpire replied with something like, “what else would I be commenting on?”  But I’m really not sure whether I imagined that conversation in my head, because I couldn’t hear it properly or whether it really happened.

This was not a very clean match, with plenty of errors mixed with some good shots.  Particularly I could not understand in this match, the same underdog mentality of the crowd that I mentioned earlier.  Especially since Bartoli’s winners were often more impressive and better-looking than Benesova’s.  I decided to make a point of clapping Bartoli’s winners, and I don’t think I could hear anyone else clapping while I was doing it (which is why this was very noticeable for me).

Feliciano Lopez walked onto the court wearing stylish big headphones and mouthing (or singing) the words to a song, only to head straight to the toilet then before coming back to the court.  I managed to take one photo just before he took it off.  That was probably the only positive memory I had of him, during his match against Kevin Anderson.

Both players started the match with dominant serving, and winning the first couple of service games easily.  But soon afterwards, it turned into a real match with groundstrokes and rallies in it.  And that’s when it started to look like, the only thing Lopez had today was his serve.  I’ve noticed in these couple of days, that not many players are getting cheap points on their serve, like there haven’t been many serve-oriented matches.  At least less than I thought there would be.

Anderson completely outplayed Lopez in this match, and Lopez struggled to win any baseline points.  One was solid and consistent, and the other missed everything.  Anderson’s groundstrokes looked good, but perhaps they’d look very different against a different opponent.  I’d like to be more insightful, but this match was quite simple.  The rain started in the final game of the match, which was good timing because that was the end of the singles matches on the outside courts.