Week 24 - Queen's Club ATP - London

Count Zero · Tennis legend

RE: Week 24 - Queen's Club ATP - London

johnnylad · Tennis legend

I assume Boggo revealing that Hutch might play Wimbledon with Haas is a typo!

steven · Tennis legend

Count Zero wrote:
interesting points. hopeing to play dubs with hutch could be good to get some wins and a possibile DC team. they have played dubs b4 i remeber, at an atp last summer i think.

i think he is saying that just winning 3 matches to Q would be good for him, not gooing on a run through nottingham MD as W&Btimes suggests

Unfortunately for Alex, as he mentioned he might, Hutch got a WC to play doubles with Huss (not Haas, which was a Count special in the transcript!), so Boggo's going to have to find another partner.

I'm sure you're right about what he meant re Nottingham.

Meanwhile, in the match between the conquerors of Bloomers and Wardy, Gonzo is finding Marat a bit easier to beat than Richard. smile (though it's not over yet)

-- Edited by steven at 16:33, 2008-06-11

Salmon · Tennis legend

Great find, Steven! Just what I wanted...

Evans is brilliant for his age, I think. I like it as people with this sort of attitude are more likely to succeed - doesn't shy from saying things as they are.

Ward's interview was great, too. Gives us a lot of background info.

And surely they didn't ask just the two questions to Bloomers?

XCW4EVA · County player

Bloomers is really bad for interviews, i remember one of the beebs people trying to talk to him and he just wanted to get out of there

steven · Tennis legend

A couple of images from the Ward-Safin match - a patched together serving sequence for James and a pic of Safin with a good-looking scoreboard! wink

Any images I post on this thread will be available in the Pictures directory with names like 2008qward1.jpg in case anyone needs a 'royalty-free' image of any of the players concerned for the home page that for the home page; higher quality versions available on request too.

James Ward serving at Queen's 2008

steven · Tennis legend

TUESDAY REPORT - PART 1

Getting there / Evans-Malisse

Living within half a mile of (but out of earshot of) a station with incredibly frequent trains is brilliant, but it does mean that you get lulled into a false sense of security and tend to cut things as fine as possible.

I would have caught the train I meant to had I not got caught having to break my run down the ramp behind a slow group of people walking six abreast and filling the whole width or had the train not decided to stop halfway down the platform. As it was, I missed it by about 10 seconds and then found that although there were two trains per hour to West Brompton, they weren't very 'symmetrically' timetabled and the next one left 50 minutes later.

Anyway, I caught the courtesy bus ok this time, but thinking that I was going to see at least a bit of Dan Evans when I arrived, I walked up the tunnel to the sound of G ... S & M being called. It did indeed seem like young Dan had been given a bit of a whipping, not to mention being forced to eat not one but two breadsticks.

Comments I heard around me about Dan after I got into the stands varied from the "it was pointless getting here to watch this match he was so outclassed" to "all the games were close and I thought he played really well" - I'm still none the wiser!

steven · Tennis legend

TUESDAY REPORT - PART 2

Andy v Grosjean

I wondered which Andy would turn up to play - would it be Mandy Murray the Moonball Muppet, Dandy Murray the Dodgy Dropper, or Amazing Andy the Fearless Fed-Killer? In the event, it wasn't really any of those three, but happily more like the third than either of the first two!

Andy got a big cheer (by Queen's standards) when he came out and started the match well, breaking Seba's serve. When I realised how well placed I was to take pics of the players up at that end (the opposite end to Monday), albeit only of their backs and backhands if they were right-handers, I decided to shoot as many pics of Andy as I could during that first game and then put my camera away, relax and enjoy the match.

The second part of that plan didn't quite work out, but at least I got some pics to post here!

Both players showed enough flashes of good grass court tennis in the first game to make me think we were in for a treat, but Andy slipped quite heavily at one point and when the trainer was called at the end of the first game, most of us feared it was for him.

It turned out to be the Frenchman who needed the trainer instead and while I didn't notice any signs of Seba being injured while play was in progress (indeed, he put Andy under a fair bit of pressure in the Scotsman's first service game before the Muzz aced his way to a 2-0 lead), after the second game he came to the net, shook hands and that was it. Perhaps any injury was more obvious on TV, that's the kind of thing that would be. Anyway, for some reason some of the people around me still thought it was Andy who was injured, and you can imagine the shock for the people who arrived 15 minutes later than I did!

My guess is that Seba wasn't that badly injured, but could be about to play his last Wimbledon and didn't want to risk not being able to play there - on the DiP feature on rolandgarros.com, it was mentioned that he was playing doubles with Guga there and that both of them were players who were close to retirement. Anyway, some members of the crowd weren't too please, one expressing the hope that he wouldn't be able to play at Wimbledon now, which despite my own disappointment, I found more than a little harsh!

steven · Tennis legend

Half a dozen pics from that first game ... I've halved the size and drastically increased the compression, so hopefully they'll load quite fast for you ...

Andy 1

-- Edited by steven at 02:04, 2008-06-12

steven · Tennis legend

Andy 8

steven · Tennis legend

That'll do for today ... lots of fun with the Bloomers match to follow tomorrow, if I can still remember it by then!

Count Zero · Tennis legend

do you mean thursday or friday? on man who knows no sleep

nice photos btw

Salmon · Tennis legend

The David Ferrer are most impressive.

mjd · Challenger qualifying

Nice pics Stephen you obviously had a very good seat.

Missed the 1st match - only 2 games in the 2nd - you must have began to doubt if it would be your day!

steven · Tennis legend

True - when Gonzo fell at one point in the Bloomers match, you could sense the crowd thinking 'oh no, is this one going to stop early too?' - but no, that match was a real crowd-pleaser (apart from the eventual result) and Mahut-Lopez was excellent too, even without the GB interest.