TENNIS:IF ANYONE is to stop Rafael Nadal from winning a record seventh French Open – and that is looking fanciful after a fifth straight sets win of composed fury – he has not announced his presence at Roland Garros over the past 11 days.
As Andy Murray was fumbling and cursing his way to defeat in four sets against David Ferrer in a drawn-out fight of variable quality on Court Suzanne Lenglen last night, and Tuesday’s winners of their respective marathons, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer, rested their bones ahead of their semi-final tomorrow, Nadal was showered, dressed and quietly batting away praise for his 50th career win on the Parisian clay.
Nadal plays Ferrer, who won 6-4, 6-7, 6-3, 6-2 in a little under four hours, with half an hour off for two rain stoppages.
Some would say it hardly matters. If Ferrer, in his first semi-final here, beats Nadal . . . well, you might as well back him to make the most unlikely of finishes and beat the winner of Djokovic-Federer in the final because he would be on a monumental high.
As Ferrer broke the Scot for the 10th time in rapidly fading light, he lifted his fist to the skies, grateful to have survived what was often an ugly match – and perhaps going away to dream the impossible. He meets a foe and friend in sublime form.
An unusually calm Murray said later, “I played some good tennis, I just didn’t convert. I had a lot of chances and I lost a lot of really long games on my serve.
“He’s so solid, so consistent that if you’re not converting your own opportunities, you suffer. It was a good tournament for me, though. Coming in I wasn’t feeling as good as last year. I believe I lost to a better clay-court player than me.”
Murray does not suffer alone, and time and again he dragged the patrons of Lenglen into another vortex of angst as Ferrer eased past him for the fourth time on clay. He’d promised a fight and he gave him one, but it was so ragged and disconnected he can hardly have been confident at any stage of the match that he was going to win the next point, let alone a game or a set.
But, even as he raged at the ground, the sky and every inanimate object from his towel to his racket, he knew he had nobody to blame nobody but himself.
Murray did not play like a world number four. His unforced error count was horrendous, 59, with a further 69 recorded as “forced”, which is a fair description of his tennis.
Nadal’s victory, tougher than the four that had gone before in this tournament but still commanding, came against Spanish compatriot Nicolas Almagro, a quarter-final that detained him a mere two hours and 46 minutes on Court Philippe Chatrier, his personal fiefdom over the years.
The numbers were 7-6 (7-4), 6-2, 6-3, but the story was much the same as his wins over Simone Bollelli, Denis Istomin, Eduardo Schwank and Juan Monaco.
Almagro took him to a tie-break in the first set but thereafter, the resistance was sporadic. Nadal finished with his fifth ace, the preferred final dagger of any player, an emphatic statement to all watching.
Maria Sharapova famously once likened her court movement to “a cow on ice”. The Russian is still no Anna Pavlova but, for an hour and a quarter yesterday, Court Philippe Chatrier was her stage alone, nary a pas de deux worth the name, as she swanned past Kaia Kanepi in straight sets. Her barnyard days are over.
There was a little stumble at the start of Act II, when the Estonian, seeded 23, went 2-0 up and threatened to make it 3-0, until Sharapova rediscovered her poise, every inch the barely flustered diva, and completed a 6-2, 6-3 win with plenty to spare.
In the semi-final, she meets the player who beat her in the Wimbledon final, Petra Kvitova. The Czech survived more serious worries in beating world number 42, Yaroslava Shvedova, 3-6, 6-2, 6-4 on Court Suzanne Lenglen.
