dont panic, 2 brak points on tsonga's serve...

what a match! wake up you lazy limeys you are missing a good one

it's gone to a tie break, and i'm going to watch it and smoke a cigarette. back soon. first point to the boy

crap. a first round loss. it is a terrible result, especially considering last week and baker's result earlier. still, in the last 2 sets he was playing well, just the first two were the problem. this is a bad start to the year.

I only managed to watch the last few games, but from them it seemed like Andy was playing as if he thought Tsonga was a muich better player than him - hardly anyo aggression, not much power (perhaps he was having trouble with the strange new balls they are using at this year's AO), mid-court balls waiting for Tsonga to hit, and a placement policy (which is usually very intelligent from Andy) seemed to be "hit it to Tsonga's hitting zone".
:sad:

I imagine though that the damage was done in the 1st set - if you don't come out all guns blazing against someone like Tsonga, then he will take the game to you ... and once a player like Tsonga is on a roll, they're very hard to stop. You need to keep them subdued from the start.

It's unfortunately very British to get a great draw (or have the draw really open up for you) then fluff it immediately - Tigger and Greg were past masters at it. :sad: I hope Andy grows out of that habit fast!

lol steven, there have been so many times with lots of hope about the AO and it all crashes early on.....remember 2002 when Tim and Greg had just won ATPs going into it, Tim was the highest ranked player left going into rd4, had just played some magical tennis to beat Greg in rd3 and then had a howler against Bjorkman to lose in straights................number of times he lost in the last 16 and then there was 2006 when both Henman and Murray went out straight away

Absolutely gutted about this one, Andy fought hard but his A game just didn't show up at all ! So many times in set 4 that I thought, now he's just going to up it a fraction, get that break and you could see that 5th set tantalisingly with Tsonga starting to slightly slow up on the serve. But crucial errors came at the worst possible times, you just can't afford to double fault at 4-4 in a tiebreak......

Andy did seem far too passive today, just putting the ball back in play and hoping that Tsonga would shank himself out of the match and he didn't really change those tactics....I don't know whether it was nerves due to the closeness of the match or the new balls or the heat but he didn't seem capable of being aggressive and really hitting through Tsonga as we've seen him do in the past, when he tried to the ball flew out. He did use these counter-punching tactics a lot in Doha, maybe got stuck in a bit of a rut with them.....what Davydenko and Wawrinka lacked was a really huge serve to put the pressure on and Tsonga had that

Just 1 more thing.....I like John Lloyd as a commentator most of the time but he has these stubborn views which get me at times......eg: with the Henman-Hewitt encounters a few years ago, he'd always say at the start, a good serve-volleyer should always beat a baseliner on grass so Tim will win....and he kept that motto even when the head-to-head was like 6-0 in Hewitt's favour.....never taking into account that the grass and balls at Wimbledon had slowed down hugely plus whatever the court speed, Hewitt loves a target

today it was...."at some point Tsonga will throw in some cheap errors at key times which will let Murray back in it"....despite the Frenchman continuing to throw huge serves down and pummel the corners

Rats !

Always another tournament !