Loss, and Serbian Davis Cup Dismay

Losses are dispiriting. And, often, something far worse. The way we process loss tends to vary, mainly because, well, people do too.


Some require catharsis. An electrifying effusion of rage and grief whose undiscriminating solar wind incinerates everything in its wake and thereby - it is to be hoped - sets the scene for healing and acceptance. Unsurprisingly, many opt to draw on their support structures (where available).
Others face misfortune with something resembling stoicism, preferring quiet, solitude and the cultivation of hope.

There's really no prescribed way through disappointment - beyond the fact that you'll have to weather it. And depending on its magnitude it can sometimes feel like those well-meaning anecdotes on personal growth and self-discovery through the 'loss of innocence' are largely platitudinous and simply in place to keep you from feeling a mess.

Almost all coping mechanisms will, however, feature an element of introspection and rationalisation.

Some such searches will yield more satisfying answers than others, though even where blame can be neatly ascribed to 'this' or 'that' or 'him' or 'her', the journey seems to be at least as important as any insight or closure it affords.

More commonly though the question of 'why' or 'how' is a fraught, intractable and confused mesh of inter-dependencies within which ideas like "blame" will collapse into their most abstract form. At least temporarily anyway.

Something like this has been playing out within the Serbian DC team (and indeed its band of supporters as well as the wider commentariat) in the wake of last weekend's loss to the Czech Rep.

Novak was of course roundly expected to come through both his singles rubbers perhaps only dropping a set to Tomas. He didn't drop a single set as it turned out - no one did, in fact, in any rubber for the first time in DC final history (the US didn't drop a set to Italy in the 1979 final either, but the opening rubber ended by way of a retirement after only one set. #History).

With Troicki and Tipsarevic sidelined however, the Serbs fielded 117 ranked Dusan Lajovic to play Berdych. As expected both teams were one a piece at the end of day one.

With the remaining singles seemingly set to mirror day one, doubles - now effectively a deciding rubber - assumed an almost seismic significance.


The true story of why Djokovic was benched for that fateful doubles rubber may never be known. There were reports of him being exhausted (and we might reasonably assume being rested for reverse singles). There were also reports of it being a "team decision". Speculation soon flowed that it might be mostly or wholly Novak's choice. And then of course there were those more fractious post match reports of everyone in the team (inc. Nenad) rounding on Nenad's evident underperformance. Nenad himself eventually indicated that "keeping the Ferrari in the garage" was a mistake. (Radek was perhaps alluding to Novak's greatness. I don't claim to understand what was going through Tomas' head. Nothing probably).

I expect the post-mortem will go on for some time. While that impulse is undoubtedly instinctive and perfectly sound, it's probably asking too much of the participants to play the role of staid, detached auditors.

However messy catharsis might already be, finding answers becomes exponentially more fraught when it takes place within the unholy alchemy of conflicting personalities, the oppressive weight of national expectation (including, but not limited to, the need to placate a visceral fanbase), the unforgiving nature of the public eye and the sheer immediacy of the loss.

One only needs to take a look at the happenings in the Argentine locker room to know that this phenomenon isn't peculiar to any one nation. But it can sometimes lead people to see things that really aren't there.

It's certainly not *inconceivable* that having Novak play doubles might have lent a different colour to proceedings. At the very least the presence of the world's best on court has to come with some pretty unique psychological benefits.

But it is possible to oversell this. It has been. It *is* being. The reality is that Novak simply isn't a good doubles player. Quite apart from his suspect doubles record, his even more 'suspect' overhead and how unnatural he still sometimes is in the forecourt, you have to indulge in a kind of bullish conceit to imagine that skills cultivated and rooted almost wholly on or around the baseline might be immediately transposed to a doubles court.

I wouldn't go as far as to say it's a different sport, but it's simply incontestable that doubles has its own distinct skillset and a dynamic that is almost foreign to most singles players (yes, even Novak). While it may be a different story if they were involved with doubles all year round, and while more top singles players could, on average, make the transition than vice versa, singles players just aren't the de facto 'star players' they're often made out to be.


That's not to say Nenad didn't clearly underperform or that Novak definitely wouldn't have instilled a little extra something against one of the most successful DC doubles pairings out there. But would this be an issue if even *one* of Troicki or Tipsarevic were present?

And would we not be demanding the head, and quite possibly the entrails, of Obradovic if the much touted benefits of Djokovic's aura failed to materialise?

It's very easy to posit robust sounding tactical corrections *after* matches have been lost. And it's very easy to pretend we'd not be seeing precisely the opposite analysis couched in equally confident terms if Novak's inclusion failed to have the desired effect (and, I hardly need add, left him even more exhausted for singles).

But whether we choose to admit it or not, Troicki's and Tipsarevic's absence remains the single most causal factor for why we are where we are.

It's one thing to want to strategise optimally given those glaring gaps in the Serbian team, and quite another to abandon all reason by losing sight of the fact that those gaps ever existed, narrowly restricting one's focus instead to "Ferraris" and "underperformance".

Perhaps the most emblematic illustration of the unhelpful and unhealthy consequences of leaving that frenzied appetite for answers unchecked, are those reports of Nenad being held responsible by the whole team - even appearing to be convinced of that himself.

Again, expecting the epitome of dry objectivity from Team Serbia at this point is a little short-sighted - to say nothing of the complete want of empathy it shows. They'll likely take a more measured view of things with the passage of time. And even if they don't it will hurt a whole lot less.

People often need (more than can be stated) such wholesale rationalisations to make sense of the world in the wake of disappointment. But that doesn't mean we continue with the conceit long after the sell-by date of its therapeutic value.

You don't bring a knife to a gunfight. But then you don't bring a Ferrari to terrain it's so obviously unsuited for either (especially when it has to race the next day). Sometimes the garage is exactly where it belongs.
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Federer, Nadal XXX and other pre-RG 'State of Play' type stuff

1) I don't like the word "favourite", but the fact is Serena goes into RG several leagues above even her two closest 'rivals' - a term that's beginning to make increasingly less sense even notionally.


I had a sense both Vika and Masha were making modest advancements in their recent encounters with her (and Vika did, of course, earlier this year, score her second win on the hard courts of Doha), but Madrid and Rome (and it would seem clay in general) clearly show otherwise.

Failing an early letdown - she's typically slow off the mark which can prove serious even in cases far less severe than last year's Razzano meltdown - it's difficult, as of now, to see her losing to anyone.

Or, to put it another way, a "disrespectful" top 50 upstart (not necessarily even a "sensation") would appear to have a greater chance of springing an upset in week one than either one of Vika and Masha would of maybe even keeping things competitive in week two.

2) However much Rafa may be the "favourite" (he'll doubtless suggest otherwise), he remains, unlike Serena, vulnerable to his closest rival on clay.

Novak's early losses and the confidence Rafa's sure to accrue in a comeback that now includes 6 wins in 8 consecutive finals (has shot him to the top of the Race, and only really "lacks" a win over Novak), may render even that concern into something less worrying.

His surreal proficiency on his preferred surface was perhaps more evident in the latter stages of Rome than at any other time during his comeback and particularly in that eye-watering first set he played against Berdych. But the fact remains that Novak is the one player with a M1000 win over him on clay this season and the only player I can see staying with him over five sets.

3) I don't know what peculiar metaphysical alchemy takes place when Federer plays Nadal but, on clay at least, it now feels like we're well beyond talk of lefty forehands being viciously spun high into single handed backhands, or of analysis itself.

There's nothing wrong with this 'post-analysis' analysis. It can be immensely liberating. But it means one has to stop floating 7 year old theories like Federer stubbornly refusing to change the size of his racquet as the meaning of life; or the very unique pressure Rafa puts him under to hit big as the primary cause of more and more rash errors which, though somewhat true, mostly feels like a way to avoid confronting reality.



The closest Fed ever got to solving this problem was also in Rome 7 years ago in the final, my personal favourite of their many encounters (even Wimbledon 08). You could describe the two match points he blew then (11:50 in the above clip) as "pressure to hit big/end the point" - that certainly wasn't what I saw this weekend.

Instead, I saw him adrift, spiritually disconnected from proceedings, in a way which transcends talk of shanks, focus and match-ups. Rafa doesn't just possess obvious tactical advantages over him, he seems to embezzle the core of his very soul on a clay court, leaving him a facsimile of the player he only thinks, rather than believes, he should be.

Glass half full: reaches a final and back at #6 in the ATP Race in his second event back. Half empty: not much in the way of serious match practice (Gilles Simon at #17 was his highest ranked opponent prior to the final) and his last pre-RG memory of competition on a clay court will be of another annihilation at the hands of one Rafael Nadal.

He's Roger Federer. He'll make the second week - if for no other reason than that the GS format of 5 sets with a day off in between works to his advantage by allowing him to drop a set now and again whilst continuing to play himself into form (Serena has no such luxury).

Beyond that, I'm just not buying into the pessimism I'm already seeing because, quite simply, none of the problems described above vs. Rafa apply to Djokovic. If Djokovic, or for that matter anyone, beats him, age will certainly factor into it, but it will essentially be about their having played a better match rather than any specific technical incompatibility or uniquely spiritual angst.

There may well be a universe in which Federer defeats Rafa on clay, but it's probably also one in which Ricardo Sanchez runs a Swiss finishing school, and Federer perhaps only possesses a couple of Slams.

4) Somewhat like Federer, Vika lost early in Madrid following an eight week spell away from the game. And somewhat like Federer she then made the final of Rome. And somewhat like him, she appears to remain further than ever from working out the problem posed by her opponent in that final.

Clay clearly isn't her strongest suit, but she hadn't, in all honesty, moved well all week to begin with. Making the final in that suspect form, therefore, has to be construed a positive. And if she can draw on the lessons learnt in her victory over Serena at Doha (many of which are mental and, therefore, surface-independent) we can, at the very least, hope for a more balanced encounter if and when they meet.

5) I'm sure she's improved but it was difficult to gauge just how much better Masha's performance on clay was this year in relation to this time last year.


Her not running into Serena last year (except on blue clay) undoubtedly helped her and thereby set in motion a wave of adulatory reporting that quite rightly made a big deal of her reinvention on the surface.

Running into Serena at this year's Madrid final refocused things, instead, on the great gulf that exists (for whatever reason) between the two in the starkest possible terms.

It's a very different build-up, narratively speaking, to RG and probably derailed any serious appraisal of her game, which may, in some ways, have improved (losing horribly to Serena again doesn't change that).

Take out: Remains, as of now, the second best clay courter out there. May have repeated last year's run during the RG build-ups in Serena's absence (and had she not gotten stricken in Rome with no one quite knows what). The same is probably true of RG itself.

6) I expect some will disagree but I don't find either of Novak's two losses during this clay court spell earth shattering: Berdych crushing the ball that accurately will beat anyone on any day, and a defeat to a rising star like Dimitrov playing the match of his life isn't, if we're honest, something that Fed or Rafa are unfamiliar with (Ernie almost did it again this event) - so it's a mistake in my mind to get too bogged down with questions about form, fitness or the presence of hostile vibrations in the ether.

On the other hand, something definitely happened to Novak in the second half of that Berdych match. And I'm guessing a 2011 Novak (the most optimal version for now) would *probably* have found his way past Dimitrov too. That second point alone means that from Novak's perspective at least, he fell short. And it shouldn't surprise us in the least to find him describing himself as "a different player" in the latter half of the Berdych match, or thinking he has work to do in general - even if we believe (as I think most everyone does) that both Grigor and Tomas earnt those wins.

7) Difficult to understand where Murray is until we learn more about the injury. As of now, all we know is that it's a problem that's been troubling him for around 18 months, and that it seemed to flair up this time last year too. That suggests a certain seriousness, although remember he won everything he did last year, and also made the finals in Aus plus another title in Miami this year with, presumably, a careful regime of managing that same complaint.


It may, of course, be the case that the physical challenges of clay pose a unique risk and, in any case, I prefer to err on the side of caution with complaints like this, but only he and his medical team really know what's going on. I certainly don't believe he should miss RG purely because "that's what Lendl did", even though that would appear to be the sensible choice this year.
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Oz: ‘I’d be Lying’

 
Djokovic d. Nadal 57 64 62 67 75

I want to say that this was the best match ever. But I’d be lying.

I want to say duration always maps to quality. But I’d be lying.

I want to say Rafa didn't have his chances and that Nole was simply too good. But I'd be lying.

I want to say that Nole is Rafa’s “kryptonite” against which Rafa supposedly has "no weapons". But I’d be lying.



I want to say Rafa played this with the same brand of daring intensity that he exhibited against Federer. But I'd be lying.

I want to say that Federer won't be smarting over this, and that he shouldn't feel short changed at not getting a crack at Nole. But I'd be lying.

I want to say that I'm completely convinced it wouldn’t have been any different had it been Federer, and not Rafa, at the other end. But I'd be lying.

I want to say that Rafa's soul won't be crushed by the worst loss of his career and that he'll snap out of it in little over a week. But I'd be lying.




That said...

I could say that the longest match in GS history was purely about the inability/unwillingness to finish off a point. And nothing to do with guts, endurance or heroism. But, here too,  I would be lying.

I could say that Nole doesn't deserve credit for taking his chances the way Rafa seemed unable/unwilling to under that kind of relentless and unforgiving pressure. But I would be lying (it's why he, and not Rafa, is world #1).

I could say that Nole doesn't deserve all manner of accolades for learning how to manage and regulate his energy levels to see this thing through. But I would  be lying.

I could say that I don't want to tar and feather those tacky enough to be talking of "faking" at a time like this. But I would be lying. You clearly don't understand sport; and sport wants nothing whatsoever to do with you.




I could say that the heroic battle of will that ensued in the  final set didn't transcend any pedantic concerns I might have had about “quality” and letting things get this far. But I would be lying.

I could say that Murray hasn't come a long way and that it's a crying shame that Lendl hasn't managed to do more with him in just one week. But I would  be lying.

I could say that Nole only has the most fleeting of chances at completing the Calendar Grand Slam by beating Rafa at RG. But I would be lying.

I could say that this wasn't #goodfortennis, that a marathon like this didn't hold appeal for both fans and non-tennisheads; that tennis, ultimately, didn't win today.

But, there too, I would be lying.

(Pics: Getty)

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Oz: The Non-Bracketology Post.

It’s happened.

Nole has been drawn against Murray. Fed will play Rafa in the semis of a Slam for the first time since RG 2005.

Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Nole	Murray	Delpo	Berd
Ferrer	Kei	Federer	Rafa

Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4
Woz	Vika	Maka	Errani
Kim	Aga	Pova	Petra

 

Legend

Hoity-Toity

Upwardly-Mobile

Sympathy Vote

Ideas above their station

Stacked


Let me guess, the counter-conspiracy theory goes something like this: Oz are merely performing an elaborate tap-dance, so we might lower our guard to all that nasty draw-rigging that regularly goes on at every Slam. There’s even Maths involved.

Whatever. But this is weird – Vika comes into this 1) uninjured and otherwise healthy, 2) having won an event just this weekend 3)  drawn as far from Serena as is geometrically and humanely possible.

Anyone that’s followed Vika’s GS career knows that this is akin to jellyfish  discovering a colony of unicorns on Mars. Knowing her luck it’s probably best to wait and see exactly how it plays out.



Other bits and bobs: 

1) Murray goes through Ryan,Ernie, Gael and Tsonga before even getting a crack at Nole. In as much as there is a short straw, I’d say he drew it.

2)  Tomic/Fer (R1)..…just, AHAHAHAHA. 

3)  Pova/Dulko (R1)….NOT FUNNY….NOT COOL

4)  Maria goes through Dulko, Sveta/Sabine and Serena before even getting a crack at Petra….so short it barely qualifies as a straw. 

5)  The Chak is back! 

6)  Other than a R16 encounter with Milos (which sounds completely groovy), can’t imagine Nole will have much trouble making the semis. 

7)  I’d like Fed/Delpo to be the QF blockbuster some are hoping for….Delpo just doesn’t seem quite there yet. 

8) Not to be unkind, but Rafa’s section is full of has-beens. There’s a small chance the likes of Nalbie nabs a set off him but that’s it. 

9) Would be nice to see Grigor make something of his life…at some point. Especially after interviews like this. 

10) LRob has just qualified to play JJ in R1. She almost squeezed a set from Maria last year. I’m not predicting an upset, but it should be colourful. More than anything involving JJ usually is.  

11)  Kim/Li R16….When was the last time two current Grand Slam Champions played each other this early???? 

12) Difficult to know what to expect from Woz right now –  I can see her getting through her early rounds, although I can also see Lucie upsetting her…maybe even in straights. Hope she survives – kinda want to see her go through Kim. It will be a big big Mountain Gorilla off her back. 

13)  Marion aside, Petra’s draw is kinda cake-walky (sorry Sam). As is always the case with Petra, this has absolutely no bearing on her chances of winning or losing ANYTHING.



Potential Early Round Mashups:

MURRAY/RYAN (R1), Troicki/Gael (R3),  Dolgo/Tomic (R3), Grigor/Baggy (R3), Rafa/Young (R3)

Lucie/JJ (R3), Kim/Dani (R3), Vika/Watson (R1), Flavia/Peng (R3), Fran/Julia (R3), Bepa/Kanepi (R3), Domi/Serena (R3), Sabine/Sveta (R3), POVA/DULKO (R1), Sam/Nadia (R3), Marion/Zheng (R3), Pavs/Ana (R3), Kiri/Petra (R3)

Maybe it’s just me, but are WTA third rounds usually this stacked?


R4 meet’n not-greets:

(ATP) Nole/Milos, Janko/Ferrer, Murray/Gael, Fed/Dolgo, Rafa/Nalb
(WTA) Woz/JJ, KIM/LI, Vika/Peng, Fran/Aga, Bepa/Serena, Pova/Sveta, Sam/Marion

QF drive-bys:

(ATP): Nole/Ferrer, Murray/Tsonga, Delpo/Fed, Berd/Rafa
(WTA): Woz/Kim, Vika/Fran, Serena/Pova. Marion/Petra

Oh yeah. And that small matter of Petra/Serena facing off in the semis.

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Oz: Magnificent.

Djokovic d. Hewitt 61 63 46 63

There’s those who “leave it all out there on court”. There’s those that “don’t know when to stop”. There’s the sensationalist  lunacy that lies beyond that. And then (and only then) there’s Lleyton Hewitt.

Bernard, Donald and Ryan better have been bloody watching.



Even the seagulls got involved.

Goodnight you irrepressible, foolhardy and quite ridiculous Creature of the Night.




It's ok. You can admit to welling up a little. Or more than a little.

I know I did.

(Pics: Getty)

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D̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶E̶v̶e̶r̶ change: 2012…Why you so 2011?

What might we rightly infer based on all of the 4 days we’ve had of 2012?

1) Ana’s still struggling. [Please don’t change your coach] 

2) Bartoli’s still not shy of almost double bagelling those that are still struggling (no sadz Jarmila, it’s a Marion thing – she did the exactly the same to Safina this time last year). Still, nice reaction.

3) Kim’s still taking three to do what should rightly be done in two.

Rust, yes? She’s played next to nothing since early last year. Except I’m not completely convinced she wouldn’t have found a way of playing three sets anyway.



4) Gael Monfils is still inventing new ways of incorporating muscle (he didn't even know he had) into set-motions it had NO BUSINESS being part of.

5) Sam Stosur is still losing matches she has NO BUSINESS losing. [Can’t see her or Li repeating last year. Happy to be proved wrong]

6) Serena Williams is still getting headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Well that didn’t take long, did it?

For the record, I dislike it intensely when people give her a free pass for indefensible conduct and, even worse, try and depict even the mildest criticism of that indefensible conduct as a uniquely conspiratorial witch hunt.

I’ll continue to dislike it in 2012, because, being honest, I don’t expect it to go away.

I also don’t expect to see the back of its flipside: that (very mainstream) injury cynicism some are ideologically hell-bent on (we’re calling it “karma” now?) – cynicism that persists even in the face of video evidence (2:27), and even when a subsequent MRI scan confirms the injury:






The ‘Free-Passers’ inspire revulsion, which in turn bolsters the repellent views of the Injury Cynics and vice versa.  It’s very obvious the two polarised trends are designed to feed off one another in a deadly embrace from which there can be no escape – my guess is they don’t want to escape.

Sometimes bad conduct is simply bad conduct, which Serena, like many, many before (and I daresay after) her, is neither immune to nor irreproachable for.  Sometimes, dearest trolls, it’s not a conspiracy.

And sometimes, dearest hobgoblins, an injury is just an injury – nothing more, nothing less. Not an occasion to use as a cathartic vehicle to air distaste, vendettas, your very personal dislike (or another word some venture that you’d hope shouldn’t be part of this discussion) of Serena, the way some air their soiled undies.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that this, too, hasn’t changed in 2012. Trolls are still trolls whatever the Gregorian Calendar might have to say about it.

Only Rafa’s unveiling of his new top-heavy frame, and of course Murray’s announcement of  what he hopes will be a game-changing (and perhaps shape-shifting) partnership with Ivan Lendl (Murr-dl?) buck this trend of same-iness, but of course neither count as both were announced in 2011.

Either the tennis season’s pulling one hell of a fast one and intends to unleash a seismic gamechanger later this year (which, being honest, would have to be at least as seismic as Novak or even Petra’s year to count), or the season really will prove to be that trite and that unconvincing…

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Fare thee well 2011: 43 of the most fugly, flatulent and forlorn moments of the year

As good as 2011 was (and it was criminally good even without Nole), it was also filled with that quaint mix of fallacy, melancholia, scandal and fuglies (on and off-court) that, in a strange way, does its bit towards holding the year together – imbuing it with a sense of well-rounded closure without which it would just be a string of tennis matches – some good, some barely worth mention.




As far as I can tell, there isn’t a year end list recounting this phenomena. 

I’ve tried to be chronological. I don’t pretend to think the list complete.

Feel free to weigh in if you think I missed something out.

***

1) (Jan, Melbourne) FAIL: Henin re-retires from tennis

Well that blows? Except it didn’t….not quite.

For what it’s worth, I rather enjoyed the few modest successes she enjoyed during the first half of of her comeback in 2010 and felt she was rather unlucky with the elbow fracture.

But when she bowed out for the 2nd time in Aus this year, just days after one of the greatest WTA Slam matches of all time, the pervasive disillusionment and ennui seemed to have rather more to do with that suffocating sense of un-retirement déjà vu, than it did with any purported despair at having lost a much loved (and unloved) legend of the game.

Not a good mix.

2) (Jan, Melbourne) FORLORN: Rafa’s not quite GS

To be honest it sorta felt right that Rafa not hold all 4 Slams – as I said at the time, that seemed to represent a level of perfection that ought to remain beyond us…for now.



But it’s not often you see Rafa slumped sobbing into a towel – not all of it stifled.

And it’s still a little eerie to consider that Rafa got within just two matches of pulling off the holy grail of the Open Era (yes I realise Fed’s been there 3 times too). 

Can’t help imagining how his season might have turned out if he did.

3) BONUS: Up’n never-quite-comers

Perhaps I’m being harsh. Perhaps I’m not. Hear me out.

Grigor: A star is not born. It never is.

Ernie: Not even sure he qualifies as a young’un any more. But to quote one of the best tweets all year, “First he was up and coming…then he wasn’t”.

Milos: Do we really need another big-serving gangloid? One that seems rather too prone to injury, in that all too familiar way gangloids often are? Wish him well, but really?

Dolgopoloved: He lures you in with his kooky, flamboyant and very sexy dance moves, that leave the charred remains of Soderling, Wawrinka and Tsonga in their wake.  It’s a boat load of fun until he reveals himself equally capable of losing in straights to the 133rd player in the world. And I’m not even convinced that Alice-Band is as charming as it once was.

Harrison/Tomic: “Hooning” and outbursts I wish I could term “uncharacteristic” mar what should have otherwise been a breakthrough year.



All of which leaves Donald Young. Yes, he’s an acquired taste, but if he repeats this year’s success after his much-maligned decision to put ‘Mom’ in charge again, I won’t be sorry.

4) (Feb) MELANCHOLIA: Mario Ancic turns his back on tennis.

Now here’s a retirement that really blows.

5) (March, Miami) FUGLY: When 52 = 100

I’m torn between this and this for WTA meltdown of the year.

Ana’s choke (and it was a choke) was truly the fugly-of-fuglies – you’ve got to be very imaginative and very dedicated to put a positive spin on that (many did).

Even so, 52 UFEs from Caro equals over a hundred from anyone else. You’ve got to rewrite Maths itself to make sense of that.

6) (March, Indian Wells) UNSUNG: “When no one remembers your name”

Or even your face.

I’ve mostly given up on Marion ever receiving much of the right kind of press.

It’s true she hasn’t always made life easy for herself (particularly in relation to her compatriots). She’s not everyone’s cup of tea. And she certainly doesn’t feel the need to pander to the media like a trained baboon.




But this year, this phenomenon seemed to me to reach a head when those nice people at Yahoo! Sports didn’t see fit to include even a single pic of the runner up in their widely-viewed photostream (not unless you specifically searched for it). An event some persist in referring to as “the 5th Slam”. 

Try and imagine Petko receiving the same treatment.

There’s laziness, there’s wilful obfuscation, and there’s straight-up disrespect. Take your pick - I’d say it’s all of them.

7) (March, Indian Wells) UNNECESSARY: Dinaroshka’s short-lived and not-so-sweet comeback 

The absurd, one-sided set of demolitions Dinara endured at the beginning of the year were both callous and uncalled for, and should probably be the subject of a UN inquiry into the use of excessive force.

Bartoli…..Kim…..and then Pova: neither defeat, incidentally, was incurred through any great fault of her own, yet she was allowed a total of just three games over all three matches. That’s just mean.

And then, after just one more month, her (what I guess we’d call chronic) back injury stopped her from playing altogether. Few believe she’s likely to return.

Sometimes it’s not a beautiful sport.

8) (April)  CALAMITY: Bepa fired Sergei for some guy named “Karen”

There are people still undergoing therapy for this.

It was like seeing Kate ditch William and shacking up with Tom Jones.

9) (April, Monte Carlo) FAIL: Jurgen Schmergen

Love Jurgen, but his attempts at what I guess we should call “fighting talk” (coming, unsurprisingly, after his defeat of Fed) made me snigger.

Daveed beat him in straights.

10) REDEMPTION: Robin Soderling

Ok, look. I’m glad Robin’s getting the love he is and only now being truly admitted in from the cold with many Rafa fans even now prepared to concede he may have been “misunderstood” (very popular word).



<brusque-haughty-Southern-accent> Just remember there were a bunch of us on this bandwagon first – we’all already took the best seats back when it was unfashionable to do so, and I’m not even remotely sorry that there’s standing room only. </brusque-haughty-Southern-accent>

In order to convince y’all, our guy had to, 1) put an end to two of the greatest streaks in history by two of the best players to have ever played the game, and 2) to then be sidelined by an illness (6 months and counting), one that has a rather nasty habit of putting paid to entire careers.

The uncomfortable parallels with Delpo, where a gruff, suspicious type gains acceptance (salvation?) after sacrificing themselves on the altar of Fedal, are only too evident.

All of which is to say that after a promising start to the year (and two years of laying siege to the top four), Sod was genuinely missed, not just by us hardcore fans, not just by tennis fans, but by tennis itself (and, I’d like to think, his enemies).

Wait, there’s more – he won’t be playing Aus. :S


11) BONUS: “Rafa had a rubbish year”

Sorry, no he didn’t. He won a Slam, reached the finals of two others, won a Masters title, reached the finals of four others, going out in each instance to a guy that only lost seven matches all year.

In other words, the only reason Rafa lost “all those finals” is that it was Rafa making “all those finals”.

You can certainly argue, as many have, that losing to the same guy so many times leaves scar tissue. That’s almost certainly true, but you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone with a functioning cerebral cortex  it would have been very different had anyone else made those finals.

12) (May, Paris) GAG: The Ball-Kid that jumped the gun

Remember him? That poor ball-kid who ran out on court before Viktor had finished putting a smash away?

And when Viktor pretended that was the reason he SPECTACULARLY blew a 5-2 fifth set lead to a hobbling Muzz?

Yeah, that was stupid.


13) (May, Paris) FLATULENCE: The wonder that is AbFab

If there’s an unvarying truth about the tennis season it’s that there’ll be at least one hedonistic atrocity during the French Open and that AbFab will be at the centre of it.

14) (June, Paris) SCANDAL: “I wags when I likes – and I likes when I wag”



Oh get over yourself. Not only have we seen other tennis players do this, we’ve seen other sports people do this. STOP PRETENDING HE THREATENED TO DEVOUR YOUR FIRST BORN.

Rafa fist-pumps with a raised knee, Nole beats his chest and merges his grunts into a celebratory roar.  Not everyone likes that either. I think we can tolerate the odd, UNHABITUAL finger-wag from Federer.

Your faux-outrage is convincing no one.


15) FALLACY: The Grunting issue that just won’t go away

Not even in the face of the biggest WTA breakthrough since Maria Sharapova in 2004. Not even after almost every player asked about it has said, in one form or another, that they couldn’t care less.

16) BONUS: “Maria had a rubbish year”

Sorry, no she didn’t. She won two Premier-fives (one on her worst surface), reached the finals of Wimbledon, the semis of RG, the finals of Miami and the semis of IW.

You can certainly argue that Pova’s game has habitually deserted her at the moments she’s had most to play for – that’s not even vaguely disputatious. You can also choose to speak that little thing known as “the truth” in relation to the Wimbledon final: that every last bit of it was on Petra’s racquet – no one with an ounce of common sense considers Petra beatable that day.

The heart of this particular fallacy relies on making a fake conflation between Maria’s admittedly untimely, disappointing play (about which many reasonable concerns might be expressed), and the idea that this somehow precludes her from ever winning a Slam (about which many unreasonable and downright salacious things have been said).

The latter may or may not be true. But the fact is that, as of now, the numbers simply don’t back it up.



Maria’s tennis may be in the gutter, but she is clearly looking at the stars.

Assume for a moment that Vika took more than just that one set from Petra (who can still go AWOL) at Wimbledon and made the final. Can you honestly not see Pova winning that?

17) (Sep, New York) FUGLY: “…on the inside”

Wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the few remaining neutrals in the stadium ended up rooting for Stosur after Serena’s little episode of self-destruction – the only truly “ugly” thing on court that night.

What hasn’t perhaps been emphasised enough – and what made it worse for me –  was whom she chose to pick on.

Eva Azderaki???  That’s like picking on Little Miss Muffet.

Equally repulsive were the amount of Serena fans who chose to make light of and, in some cases, to defend it – often from the same group that like to crap on Andy Roddick for his “anger management” issues.

Serena is what she is. She has her ugly side like anyone else. She’s unlikely to change very much. She’s gotten enough heat for it. And not all of her run-ins with authority figures have been her fault.

But it seems to me you’ve lost your right to be taken seriously if you made light of this blunder.

18) (Sep, New York) SCARY: The Slap

Not the Aussie novel, but the single most spectacular moment of this and most other years I care to remember. ‘Decisive’ doesn’t quite capture it.



I mostly included it for the sake of completeness. And because it’s flat-out scary.

Understandably, it’s provoked all sorts of reactions, ire and outrage,  euphoria and delirium.

People clearly have  a lot of very strong (and not always pent up) feelings over it – feelings they mostly don’t know what to do with.

I don’t rightly know whether it’s a good or a bad thing – or whether it’s even meaningful to think in those terms.

To this day, I haven’t even been able to trace where the ball actually landed.

Fed, of course, dismissed it as “luck”, a child-like “slap” – the kind of ‘street tennis’ he wasn’t brought up to play. Novak’s supporters (and many others), of course,  marvel at its sheer audacity.

Where you choose to sit on that divide is largely a matter of philosophy. You should be able to see both sides.

In the end, it got Nole what he wanted. And that, I suspect, is all that counts.

19)  (June) BLAH: The Gimelstob/Feli bust up

Noteworthy for the revelation that Feli gets hot under the collar.

Non-noteworthy for the revelation that Gimelstob should get anyone hot under the collar.

20) BONUS: “Murray had a rubbish year”

His post-Oz slump was uniquely icky. He continues to have trouble with Fedalovic at the Slams. And people are right to ‘meh’ over his clean-up of the Asian Swing.

But there’s nothing rubbish about 4 Slam SFs. Or, for that matter, the best clay court season of his career. Next.

21) (June) FAIL: Lynn Barber played at being Rafa iconoclast.

I get what she was trying to do. I just don’t think she got what she was trying to do….let alone the matter of actually doing it.

22) (June) HEGEMONY: “Script-Gate”

I’m told there’s an argument that it would be an existential threat to journalists’ livelihoods and credibility if they didn’t get first bite of the players’ press-conference cherry.

That the only way around this is withholding those pressers from the public domain for at least 24 hours, thereby giving them an ample window within which to work on and release their pieces, well before ‘Boris Blogger’ is allowed to  get his dirty mits on them.

I’ve only ever been partially convinced with that explanation.

What’s criminally unambiguous is how much this smacks of snobbery and hegemony.

23) (June, Wimbledon) EPIPHANY: Pironokva discovers the existence of ranking points outside of the Slams.

Simply astonishing.

So ends one of the great mysteries of life – how Pironkova manages to move like a fairy whilst razing the competition at Wimbledon, but is unable to otherwise win two matches together all year.


This year she made the QFs at Wimbledon and was one of only two players to take a set off Petra. No one was very surprised.

I’m still not completely sure this wasn’t a hoax. But I kind of want it to be true as it would explain EVERYTHING (and an awful lot besides).

24) (June, Wimbledon) UNSUNG: Domi made the QFs of Wimbledon meaning she’s now reached the R16 or better at every Slam.

QFs or better if you exclude Oz. She also won her (long overdue) first WTA title.

I get that she hasn’t the fanbase others do. I get that it’s unreasonable to expect non-fans and neutrals to undergo the levels of ecstasy experienced by that modest fanbase (of which I’m unashamedly a member). I’m even willing to concede that she hasn’t always helped her cause .

I don’t get why such a WTA milestone barely gets a mention by any of the outlets (mainstream and those that like to think of themselves as “indie”). Try and imagine the euphoric whiplash if and when, say, Kirilenko or Pavlyuchenkova (nothing against either of them) makes that same milestone.

Players have inspired cults for doing far less. Instead, this was deemed more relevant.


25) (July) FAIL:  Janko/Nole stage a mock assassination.

Tasteless, yes. Damning? No.

And before anyone brings it up, no  it’s not a “cultural thing” either.

No more than humiliating chair umpires is “an American thing”, or punching your racquet strings to the point of drawing blood is “a British thing”.

26) REDEMPTION: Mardy Fish

I never really got why it was considered “trendy” to hate on Mardy Fish. He has his dark side like most of us (and seems to consider being unable to speak French a matter of pride) – still, the reaction has always seemed disproportionate, out of control and, at times, downright ugly.

In any case, at some point early on this year his image seemed to undergo a transition.

Much of it can be traced, of course, to the fact that he began winning. That usually helps. But it’s also a simple matter of practicality: they simply transferred their bile to a new (and easier) target: Ryan Harrison.

And it all went swimmingly well (for a while): those that would once have pointed and laughed, looked on dotingly as Mardy publicly rebuked Ryan for a childish, braggy tweet.

@ryanharrison92 Those are the kinda tweets that get ya unfollowed...

— Mardy Fish (@MardyFish) November 7, 2011

It was a fair point, but didn’t in my mind seem like it deserved such public censure – older and more mature players than Ryan have gotten away with far worse.

What was more likely is that they’d simply overcompensated in their appropriation of Mardy; an easy mistake to make  in the presence of what they deemed a greater and more obviously obnoxious evil – that would be Ryan, for those still with me.
Either way, there was no doubt about it – Mardy’s stock was up.

The fake-out was revealed for what it was with the “don’t-speak-French-dumbass” episode which is when the illusion was shattered, and all those latent Fish anxieties resurfaced once more.

God only knows what 2012 will bring.


27) (July, Wimbledon) HEARTBREAK: Muzz’s Wimbledon SF loss.

I played the blame game.



Difficult to conceive of this being anywhere near as heartbreaking as the Oz final, which I still maintain had much more to do with his own poor performance.

But the Wimbledon SF seemed to me to underline how far he still has to go when Rafa, Fed or Novak are redlining – or whether he’ll even get there. That’s much worse. Isn’t it?

28) (Aug) ENIGMA: Caro parted ways with Piotr

And then sort of didn’t. And then did, again. Kinda. I dunno.

Whatever. Ricardo-Caro on court-coaching will be one of the early highlights of next year.

29) (Aug, Cincinnati) GROSS-OUT: The worst tie-break of the year

The closing moments of this were probably far worse than even Muzz/Haase. Whereas the latter’s atrocities were at least diffuse, this one seemed to have all the toxins distilled into the final set tie break.

At the end of it all, as if in relief, Dasco squatted down and spat on the court (he might just as well have barfed or blown his nose), an apt way to seal in the EVIL. Nevermore to be mentioned amongst polite society. Or, you know, normal people.


30) (Aug, Canada) NUTTY: Canada did its thing…

And it was WACK.

31) (Sep) BLAH: That familiar sound of itchy fanatics undercutting Noles season.

Whatever took them so long?

32)  (Sep, New York) BEATDOWN: Rafa’s 2nd worst loss of the year.

He managed to wangle a set out of it. And perhaps just the faintest scrap of dignity. That was all he wangled out of it.

33)  (Sep, New York) FLATULENCE: The worst match of the year

Bar none. WTA included. Challengers/Futures....in fact every ITF match played this year.

What happens in Ashe stays in Ashe.

34) FLAT: Li Na and Sam Stosur

Don’t get me wrong. What they’ve achieved this year is MONUMENTAL, each in its own way. Sam winning the USO, in particular, is perhaps my favourite moment of the year. Vindication, for her many long-suffering fans and of their undying belief in her game.

But if you’re gonna manhandle Caro for not being up to scratch in the Slams, it’s only fair that you do the same for those unable (or unwilling) to perform outside of them.



Both Sam and Li are top ten players whose tennis ability is undisputed amongst even the harshest of critics. Both’s non-Slam record this year has been DISMAL. Neither, as far as I can tell, was injured.  In other words, there’s no excuse.

What this also means is you really can’t be that confident of their chances next year (the way you might have been with Fran after RG 2010).

Who would you choose to watch your back in a street fight? Pova would be in most people’s top 3, you might imagine Fran or Marion (who didn’t even make a Slam final) would feature highly too…a few might even pick Caro.

Not many would choose Li or Sam. It’s easy to see why.


35) (Oct, China) FAIL: The journo that dared mention the ‘R’ word. Roddick was having none of it.

And no, this wasn’t a “cultural thing” either. We really need to stop confusing flat-out blunders with culture.

36) (Nov) BLAH: Nole’s season finally caught up with him

He pulled out of Paris for which he was flayed alive, and then bowed out quite timidly in London.

No one was very surprised.

37) (Nov, London) UNDERWHELMED:  The ATP WTF photo shoot blew

After the Abbey Road and Downing St., I’m, frankly, kinda outraged a bigger fuss hasn’t been kicked up over how rubbish this was.

38) (Nov, London) OUCH: Rafa’s worst loss of the year

The score was true. Just like the man said.

39)  BONUS: “I saw her first…No I did…No me….Me”.

Major, MAJOR peeve. Apologies in advance for going on for so long.

Every time we get a new talent emerging – and especially when they have their breakthrough the way Petra did this year –  we seem to get a rush of self-satisfied morons who claim to have been in attendance many years ago when talent-x (then a scraggly looking teen) went out in round two of a Challenger event so obscure it probably doesn’t even exist anymore.

The obscurity is deliberately selected and is in direct proportion to the accolade you are now expected to confer upon them for having “a good eye”, as well as being more generally awesome than you in all other respects. No – it’s actually that infantile.

Think of it as their vicarious version of the rags-to-riches tale. Their moment to bask in the radiance of talent-x’s reflected glory.

They remind me of those knobs that sometimes turn up on the IMDB message boards claiming to be Johnny Depp’s 2nd cousin.

What are you – nine years old?



Firstly, NO ONE CARES that Petra was your, my or anyone else’s “discovery”….like, at all. Whatever brownie points they think they might be accruing with these (not even that fanciful) tales don’t seem worth it somehow. Most of us stopped doing this sort of thing at the age of 10.

Secondly,  most people I know make it a rule to disregard anything not immediately verifiable  – the outlandish and the not so outlandish.  So even in the unlikely event that their little unmagical fairy tale turns out to be true, it’ll be treated as guff. And it’ll be entirely proper that it be treated as guff. Most of us learnt this lesson early on in life. 

The most frightening aspect of this pre-school behaviour is that it’s exhibited by relatively mature people of a certain age – people that seem well grounded in all other respects, but who then suddenly, mysteriously, take leave of their senses.

Takeout: Pics (and preferably links), or it didn’t happen. And I doubt anyone will care even after that.


40)  (December) CLOAK AND DAGGER: Why exactly did it take so long to appoint an ATP boss?

This one had all the political intrigue and mystery of a bestselling spy novel.

Ian Ritchie was wikileaked before any official announcement – that kinda scuppered things.

Krajicek was deemed short on business experience by Federer. But what role did the discovery that he follows the unsavoury Islamophobe Geert Wilders on Twitter have to play?

Then, with only 9 days of this year left, we suddenly hear someone called Brad Drewett has been appointed.

He seems, from what I can tell, to have  the right blend of business and tennis experience. Which kinda begs the question, where’s he been all this time?

It seems, to put it charitably, like something they cobbled together at the 11th hour. Or, to put it less charitably, an appointment of last resort.

41) FUGLY: Fed 2nd only to Nelson Mandela

Not that I have any trouble accepting that Federer (or any one below him on the list) should be “liked” or “respected”.

All the same, this made me hurl. And I make no apologies for it.

It would be no different if it were Rafa, Novak or any of the other top 10 most "liked, respected, admired and trusted" world leaders juxtaposed alongside a lifelong activist who forsook all the pleasures of life most of us take for granted in favour of a struggle for freedom and equality that cost him almost 30 of the best years of his life.

But perhaps that's the fault of the survey and iffy sounding metrics like "liked" and "admired".

In any case, the survey also uncovered that older respondents tend to be more critical (not surprising), as do Latin Americans (really?); women tend to be drawn to corporate figures (although also more critical of the female ones) whilst men favour sports stars. World leaders don't fair particularly well at all.

Not to be a spoilsport, but all of that seems far more compelling.


42) FOLIE DE-GRANDEUR: Trial by Noah

Every year an ex-player (not always a legend) makes a tired bid to make themselves relevant again.

This is mostly harmless (if a little embarrassing) and usually takes the form of making the most outrageous picks and forecasts imaginable. It’s something of an annual pageant.

”Fed will never win a Slam again”, “Rafa’s washed up”, “Novak has peaked”, “Murray will win multiple Slams”…that sorta thing.



This year that role was filled by Yannick Noah, who chose to crap not just on Rafa, not even just on Spanish tennis….but on all of Spanish Sport.

It was, to put it mildly, in a class of its own.

There’s kangaroo courts. There’s the many layers of hideous-kinky that lie below that. And then (and only then), do we get to the lowest depths  of farce and ego-mania that is the ‘Trial by Noah’.

43) FOLIE DE GRANDEUR: Martina Hingis and the (incessant whiny) tale of the on-again-off-again Olympics mixed-doubles partnership.

First it was “leaked” that Fed’s people had approached her. Then she denied any such thing had happened. Then it seemed to be on-again. And then it didn’t.

By now, most had lost interest and were willing and wishing it would remain “off-again”. Permanently.

The same might be said of all those insufferable “teasers” that would seem to indicate she may be persuaded to compete in Oz. Singles, doubles, I really don’t care.

Only Mc-Wozil-Roy, inspire more tepid and vacuous thoughts. And sometimes, I’m not even sure of that.

The moral of the tale must surely be how it’s possible to kill what might have once been a credible story by running it again, and again, AND AGAIN,  through the rumour mill.

And if there’s a “story” here at all, it’s that this was THE MOST BORING NON STORY OF THE YEAR.
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Novak Djokovic and the Politics of Admissibility

There were certainly a lot of (not terribly consistent) thoughts in the immediate fallout that proceeded from Wertheim’s decision to tweet a link to an Albanian blog post. A  well-researched post that he presumably thought put "the other side” of the narrative surrounding Nole’s conquest of the world rather well.


In so far as it was possible to disentangle, my first impulse was actually to agree.

We’d heard, it seemed to me, rather a lot since 2005 on Serbians training in emptied-out swimming pools with little or no mention of the devastation Milosevic and Co. wrought in that region during the 90s.

Perhaps the decision not to mar that early rise of Serbian tennis with reference to those atrocities was the right one.  Why, after all, should the country’s athletes (many of whom were pre-pubescent at the time) be expected to shoulder that burden? What can their tennis have to do with the prevailing political circumstances of their childhood?

Well, if you’re going to persist in chronicling the difficulties you faced during those early years (none of which I disagree with by the way) and weave it into an elaborate symphony of national reawakening,  it actually has EVERYTHING to do with it.

 

Its perfectly valid for Ana or Novak to draw attention to how their geopolitical plight placed their tennis development in a vastly different context from, say, Andy Roddick’s formative years. It did.

It’s equally fair for others to want to challenge much of that romantic imagery when you are a self declared nationalist using your (well earned) position to garner international support for your homeland.



Novak’s no different to any self-respecting athlete in wanting to raise his country’s profile in this way, but you can hardly blame others for wanting to relay the other side. Particularly those that lived through and were immediately affected by the conflict.

Quite apart from any of that, a superstar’s personal life and attitudes (both pre and post stardom) have always been fair game. That would have been true even if Novak weren’t an avowed nationalist. Only a tendentious prick will insist those attitudes tell the whole story, yet they always have and always will shape opinion. Not at all at odds with the now burgeoning narrative surrounding Novak’s rise to the top.

All well and good. But that’s when the cracks began to appear.

For one thing, it didn’t seem to me that the Kosovo post told us anything terribly new. Only the very young, in this age of Smartphones and Wikipedia, will have managed to remain wholly ignorant of a conflict that spanned most of the nineties – a conflict described as the most devastating since World War Two.

The Kosovo blog post was certainly a worthy reminder of the last of those conflicts, furnished with facts you may have missed (or forgotten from) the first time round. But it wasn’t, ultimately, all that revelatory.

Secondly, as many have already pointed out, branding Novak a “dangerous nationalist” on the basis of one quote is rash, uncouth and a little confused. You can certainly see why those living, to this day, with the consequences of ethnocentric expansionism might be naturally suspicious of Novak’s patriotic side. That’s a far cry from those neo-fascist extrapolations that are as bizarre as they sound and helpful to precisely no one.



All of which brings us back to Wertheim. Who, on the one hand, deemed it both relevant (key word) and important enough to link to a blog post some might consider tendentious. But then ducked accusations of bias by offering to link to a rebuttal.

I really don’t think Wertheim was taking sides – that is, I’m sure he has a private opinion (one he may have been itching to get out), but I rather doubt that was ever what this is about.

And I’m not sure I buy into the outrage of those that would have us believe that linking to blogs in this way constitutes a new-fangled form of low-rent journalism.  Journalists of all spheres and from all walks of life link to blog posts all the time. It’s becoming increasingly acceptable to do so (within certain limits) and we should expect to see a lot more of it.

Nevertheless, it does seem somewhat irresponsible to do so with something as explosive as this. Offering to link to a rebuttal feels too much like offering to call the fire service after burning the house down.

What then? Bravado? Telling “the untold story”? .

Well let’s see: a liberal American journalist posted a link to a blog post highlighting the illiberal nationalism of an Eastern-European nation state with fairly weak US diplomatic ties – a country that until recently was considered by many US politicians as something of a pariah state. 

Nothing even remotely radical about that – I daresay he wasn’t trying to be. Nor have I any reason to doubt that he felt it was worth telling that “untold story”. Or AN untold story, at any rate – one it’s politically expedient to tell. Plenty remain untold.

Not to single out Wertheim (the problem’s bigger than any one person), but it’s easy to offer up counter-narratives to a brand of nationalism that’s fallen out of vogue with most of the more liberal west – and it’s easy to deem that kind of discourse “relevant” when it isn’t at odds with any national agenda.

Would he have linked to a Palestinian blog during the Dubai/Peer debacle two years back? There’s an “untold story” there too.

Saying the two situations aren’t comparable because of either the glaring discrepancy between Novak and Shahar’s standing in the game, or simply because there’s no accompanying rhetoric surrounding Shahar that involves training in emptied swimming pools is disingenuous.



What this episode speaks to, ultimately, is the politics of admissibility – the politics that determines what’s relevant and what’s not. Or to put it more crudely, who’s in and who’s out.

Politics that’s bigger than any single journalist – indeed, politics that both subsumes and governs their industry. Like I said, it’s really quite crass to single Wertheim out.

As it happens, I didn’t agree with Dubai back then either – not least because it felt kinda ridiculous for a WTA event to even consider banning a WTA player. But neither did I feel they didn’t have the right to protest against an on going occupation by a country they don’t even have diplomatic ties with (I can only assume that Dubai, like others in the vicinity – to say nothing of the many Jews and non-Arabs worldwide –  didn’t take too kindly to Israel’s then recent incursion into Gaza that had resulted in 1400 Palestinians dead, over 900 of them civilians).

But none of that was deemed either “relevant” or “admissible”.  Instead, we simply went, as we always do, through the tired old charade of pretending that nothing that’s occurred in that region in the past 60 or so years could have or should have given rise to this state of affairs. Words like “discrimination” and “exclusion” were used by no less than Venus Williams and Andy Roddick as if they were the exclusive provenance of one side, and Shahar in particular.

Well, there’s “another side” to that too. Though you’ll have to cast your net just a little wider to get at it.  The absence of a counter-narrative here would be quite laughable if it weren’t so chilling.

***

Novak’s hardly unique in holding views some might find unpalatable. Players, celebrities and superstars have done that since time immemorial.

Nor would it surprise me very much to learn that he may harbour future political ambitions–

When Djokovic won the Wimbledon championships in July -- which catapulted him to the top of the world rankings -- all of Serbia was ecstatic. A euphoric Serb president jokingly offered Djokovic his post, while 100,000 jubilant fans welcomed their native son back to Belgrade with folk songs, fireworks and red-blue-and-white flags.
-- Spiegel 

A joke? Really? In a world where Marat gets appointed to the Russian Parliament? Anyone that’s followed Novak’s rise to superstardom knows that he might have been earmarked for Serbian statesmanship as far back as 2007.

"The war also made me a better tennis player because I swore to myself that I'd prove to the world that there are good Serbs, too."

Is that bad?

I’m not going to pretend to be a great fan of nationalism – not least because it’s seems unhealthily predicated upon the alienation of those “unlike” you. But it’s hopelessly naive not to think it plays a rather large role in the lives of many in that region (and indeed of many in the “liberal” west) – the vast majority of whom simply want to live in peace.

Is there any reason, at this point, to think Novak’s nationalism should be any different to, say, that of Goran Ivanisevic?


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ATP WTF: BEHOLD THE POWER OF THE ‘COJONES’

Daveed has made the semis having won 4 out of 4 sets played against the number 3 and number 1 players in the world.

No one else in the entire DRAW can make that claim.

In other news, I love sport.

No idea what was going on with Nole.

I mean, yeah, he must be tired with the amount of tennis he’s played this year, but that doesn’t quite account for the criminal amount of balls that landed at the bottom of the net.

Assist (as with any Spanish victory this week): Yannick Noah.

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