Winning Unmemorably
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By TW Contributing Editor Andrew Burton
In my Sunday Crisis Center post I wrote "I'll be match reporting and trying to give you a sense of color and atmosphere."
Then I made a mistake. I popped across to Concrete Elbow and took a look at some of Steve's impressions of his first days at Indian Wells. It made me want to close my laptop, switch off the power, and maybe write the occasional press conference summary during the middle of the week. If you want color and atmosphere, you owe it to yourself to savor some of what Steve's been posting:
The stands are low out there. You get a full view of the cavernous sky and its gradations of blue—it seems more prominent here, a bigger deal, than in the East—which is set off by jutting brown hills and rows of stark, white lighting towers that line each side of the courts. From this vantage point, everything is dry and stripped and hard. Wozniacki's and Kanepi's shots cracked through the air, and you could hear each individual scrape—chicka-chicka-chicka—of their shoes as they set up to hit.
As my father used to say, follow that.
The match I was looking forward to today, Seppi vs Wawrinka, also was on the outside courts, Court 6. I'd thought it was first up, but in fact it got underway at about 12:30pm. The match score makes it seem like a beating - Wawrinka won 6-1, 6-3, taking 72 points to 49, or about 60% to 40%. But while the match was on, you never had the impression that Wawrinka was dominating the play, even (and it's really odd to write this) when he was 5-0 up in the first set and missed a FH swinging volley which would have given him a bagel set.
Last year at Toronto, I saw Wawrinka beat Bolelli, and I remarked on how undemonstrative Wawrinka is when he plays. There's the occasional "allez" after winning a key point, but even this felt a little bit forced - like the gymnast trying to remember to smile at the end of a routine. Wawrinka was on the attack for much of the match, but it was almost entirely with his weight of shot from the baseline - when he made a transition volley then put a volley away in the penultimate game of the match, a spectator two chairs down from me remarked that that was the first time either player had had a sniff of the net.
Seppi hit the ball perceptibly flatter than Wawrinka, and one of the reasons that he lost was every thirty shots or so he'd misaim the ball and hit a neutral baseline groundstroke into the net. That doesn't sound like a big problem, but in the modern power baseline game a lot of the rallies last 20 or more shots, and so Seppi was leaking a point a game or so to shots that hit the net six inches below the net cord. Although I was mentally cheering Wawrinka on, I did notice that Seppi was using a ProKennex frame - which makes him the only ATP pro I know who uses the same frames I do.
Wawrinka looked to be cruising home at 4-3 in the second set, but then he and Seppi locked into a death march game - one of those games when you realize, about the eighth deuce, that there's no reason why the match ever has to finish. On the tenth deuce point, Seppi buried another neutral FH in the middle of the net, and decided to give his racquet the Full Marat. While he trudged to his chair to get a new one, I tried to suppress my outrage at his treatment of a fine ProKennex. But karmic justice was done, for Seppi didn't win any points with his new stick, and five points later we were done.
As I was leaving, I stopped for ten minutes to watch the last two games of Black/Huber against Kleybanova/Nicolescu. Cara Black has long been one of my favorite doubles players. Her volleying technique is one of the best on either tour - something to remember when you consider Steve's description of the WTA players at practice this weekend. But the best point I saw was memorable for Monica Niculescu, who played six volleys in succession, including a toe topper off a Black smash and the eventual winner down the middle between her lunging opponents. Maybe Nicole Vaidisova could try her hand at doubles.