French Open 2013: The good, the sublime, the bad and the ugly

The Sublime

I’ll just go ahead and say it: they should create a separate tour for Serena Williams, a tour where normally-imperious champions aren’t made to look like hapless toddlers. The aforementioned near-loss to Kuznetsova aside, there was nothing and no one that seemed even remotely capable of challenging the American, and her preposterous dominance of Sara Errani in the semifinal moved Sports Illustrated columnist Jon Wertheim to call it the “most one-sided match he’d ever seen”. And all this on a surface that is supposed to be completely alien to her game. Where’s that separate tour already?

Rafael Nadal doing his famous trophy-biting ritual

As for Rafael Nadal, we’re going to run out of superlatives for his dominance on clay very soon. Some players take as many as three whole years to get back to their best after a long injury layoff, like Maria Sharapova. Some others get back to competitive play after a couple of years, but never regain their devastating pre-injury game, like Juan Martin del Potro. And still others struggle in the wilderness right until the end of their career, a la Lleyton Hewitt. What does Rafael Nadal do after his long injury layoff? Reach the final of the first 9 tournaments he enters, winning 7 of them, with the last one being a record-breaking 8th title at Roland Garros. In a comeback to beat all comebacks, Nadal overcame indifferent form, unfortunate scheduling, a spirited Novak Djokovic and about a hundred other smaller obstacles before opening his shoulders and emphatically defeating his countryman in the final to add yet another spectacular chapter to his legacy. I think I have run out of superlatives already.

As far as sublime sights at Roland Garros go, the 4th round match between Stanislas Wawrinka and Richard Gasquet has to rank pretty high up the list. For close to 4 hours, the two players did what they’re best at: producing the most delectable shot-making imaginable, hitting winners from all parts of the court and unleashing their gorgeous one-handed backhands time and again to elicit ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from every single spectator lucky enough to watch the match live. The match ended 8-6 in the fifth in favour of Wawrinka, which, in terms of pure numbers, fell just short of the Nadal-Djokovic semifinal (which ended 9-7 in the fifth). But for the sheer audacity and beauty of the tennis that was on display, the Wawrinka-Gasquet match wins my vote for ‘match of the tournament’.