Once again there is more a great tennis in Doha! The Qatar Open has as its big draws Federer, Nadal, Murray and Roddick, and I was fortunate to go to three of the days.
Much of the downsides of tennis in Doha were still there: school groups, people bringing in babies etc, and the first two days I attended it was dang cold. I was prepared this year -- I had four layers on and gloves. Last year I went straight from work wearing just a suit and froze my butt off. This year I was cozy.
Two of the days I went with Kamahl and his in-laws. Now his in-laws are Scottish so you know we had to go watch Andy Murray. We had purchased tickets over a week ago, gambling that Murray was going to be playing on the first day since he was champion last year. We were half-right, he was playing but it was doubles not singles. The only 'big' player playing singles that evening was Andy Roddick. So we watched the Roddick game before moving to Court 2 to watch Murray. Turns out seating at Court 2 was small (~150 seats in a total of 5 rows) so we were really close to the game. Kamahl's in-laws enjoyed the fact that they got to watch Andy Murray from about 30 feet away. We were sitting in seats by the baseline and during one game a long ball was called in by the umpire and Murray disputed it while we were all shouting "out" from our seats. The call stood, then Murray turned to us and said "How far was it out, this much?" while holding his hands about a foot apart. I don't think it was out by that much but we all laughed.
The best night was the quarter finals. While Roddick had an easy time with his game, the next game featuring Nadal and Gael Monfils was a different story. I had heard of Monfils (ATP rank #13) but had never seen him play. Turns out he has a very aggressive style and a bit of entertaining cockiness, like doing little moves after he scores a big point. By the middle of the first set the crowd was supporting him, and after he won the first set 6-4 with some excellent tennis the crowd was fully behind him to beat Nadal. The second set saw more excellent play by him and the wound up beating Nadal 6-4 6-4, probably the biggest win of his career.
I was hoping that he would win the semifinals against Roddick but alas he lost in three sets.
As for the other quarters Murray and Federer won their matches in straight sets. Federer's match was interesting as he was playing against Kohlschriber (ATP rank #28) so everyone was expecting a cakewalk. After winning the first set 6-2 Federer was up 4-1 when suddenly his game really started getting mediocre and he was missing a lot of shots. Kohlschriber came back from a 4-1 deficit to take it to a tie-breaker game! And in the tie-breaker game Kohlschriber went up 6-3, thus had triple-set point, but blew it and Federer managed to take the second set and the match 6-2, 7-6 (8). People were a little surprised that Federer had to scramble for that set and questioned whether he was fully in form.
Federer played Murray in the semis and lost in three sets so that appeared to answer that.
Murray and Roddick are playing in the finals right now. Sadly I did not have tickets but c'est la vie. I'm rooting for Murray.
No comments:
Post a Comment