I was impressed when at one point JL shouted out 'come on Katie, davai!' presumably (I never thought to ask him, but he might be able to confirm) with the aim of annoying him

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Who told JL which one was Katie?

 

steven wrote:

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On the odds I printed on Sunday night to do Billy the Bookie's picks, Falla was 70/1.

I think you'll find LT was sitting next to Federer Snr, i.e. Robert not Roger, who would have been supporting Chiudinelli.

Just like I'm pretty sure (though not as recognisable as Fed's dad, obviously) that Johnnylad and I ended up next to Mr Bondarenko during Katie's match - he was cheering "Come yon Alyona, Davai!" a lot (I'm not sure how Ukrainian "Come yon" is!), taking notes (her mum is her coach, so that would make sense) and had very similar facial features to his daughter. If he wasn't her dad, he must have been some kind of relative.

I was impressed when at one point JL shouted out 'come on Katie, davai!' presumably (I never thought to ask him, but he might be able to confirm) with the aim of annoying him

 

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As you no doubt suspected, steven, "come yon" is merely Ukrainian pronunciation of the English phrase. "Davai" is the Ukrainian phrase; "davaiy" is the Russian (but the spelling difference is more pronounced in Cyrillic of course). I went to see Sashko play - he's making his Wimbledon debut and I'd not yet seen him play live, and remembering the enquiries of everyone at the French Open Pick'em about how well I thought Sashko would transition to the grass, I was pretty interested to see how he'd handle it. He is after all, as has been pointed out, a big clay court specialist, and had never played on grass in his pro career until Eastbourne. Managed to catch the end of Gilles Simon's match, then naturally there was a big exodus since many people were only interested in watching the seed play, and was able to bag prime seats at the net for myself and a mate from uni. Members of the public and then pressers with those massive cameras started looking over and taking photos; it was into the second set before I realised the man with the Federer cap sitting next to me was indeed Fed Sr. I guess since it was Fed's day off his father had decided to watch another Swissman's match - Marco Chiudinelli was Sashko's opponent. He had a lot of muttered words to say about Chiudinelli's performance, and wasn't happy about Sashko looking at the lines when Chiudinelli hit shots that were called good (but really that was a bit uncalled for as Sashko barely glanced at the lines and didn't question the calls). I had plenty to cheer about in Ukrainian though, and did so loudly .


Duzhe dobre match from Sashko. There's definite room for improvement - that scoreline could have been better - but it was impressive. The serve is so unusual, but very strong. You wouldn't necessarily expect it, seeing as Sashko is 6'0" and his build is very slight. The service motion is vaguely reminiscent of Roddick. Unlike most players who take a big stride into it and extend the racquet head to that classic "back-scratching" position, the service motion is very abbreviated - the racquet head gets very little extension, the motion is little more than a plie and a whiplash follow-through. As a result, the service motion is completed in half the usual time, extremely fast and very difficult to read. He got a lot of cheap points off that serve through aces. Just astonishing - sometimes he'd be 40-0 up after 60 seconds in the game. Ridiculously good. Sashko loves that slice too. It's a good shot in his arsenal. Some rallies he'd just slice repeatedly to the same spot several shots in row - Chiudinelli just couldn't handle it, he was getting very hacked off. There were also some absurdly good on-the-line winners, power going all the way through them. Straight sets win for Sashko. He could work on maintaining consistency in his accuracy - sometimes he was making the right shot but it just didn't pay off, in terms of it found the net or it didn't find the line. Will be very interesting to see how he does against Tsonga.

 

-- Edited by LadyTigress on Wednesday 23rd of June 2010 09:54:34 AM

eblunt wrote:

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The limited amount of info available ( i.e. I can now see what I picked, since I had completely forgotton ) leads me to believe I must have been 'on' something when I made my selections ... How could I have been such a muppet.

Do any of you have a traditionally 'unlucky' player in your pickems ? one that always seems to cost you points ? Mine is Tsonga - He's always lowish seeded but whenever I pick him to get to the quarters or better he goes out early, but as soon as I have him to fail to make his seeded position he always seems to play well. And he also seems to be involved in a lot of 50-50 picks by the time you get to round 4, so I always seem to get that one wrong. He costs me at least 3 points every pickem.

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I think just about every GEM comes into that category - it's our definition of 'muppet' - it doesn't mean a bad player, it means a player who only drastically outperforms when they've underperformedso badly for so long that you've given up on them. Dammit Gasquet being the original example of course.

Btw in case you haven't tried the page or seen on twitter yet, my computer crashed last night midway through doing the results  (a few minutes after the last time I came on here to read a few more posts and give myself a break from the spreadhseets swimming in front of my eyes!) - at that point I gave up in disgust and went to sleep for a few hours.

I'll try to get at least partial results out during the day if work permits, otherwise this evening, but I have at least managed to get the all picks lists ready, and they have win/loss shading for the matches completed so far.

 

So Sashko is the new Olek??

Picking Luczak over Robredo was a nice surprise, didn't remember doing that. Berankis to the 4th round looks a little optimistic now though

Thanks FD for at least making me feel that there was at least some sound reason for my choice of such progress for GGL.  I did vaguely remember convincing myself that he could play to a not inconsiderable degree on grass.

Essentially I am now happier that the fault is not mine but HIS !!

Depends on how much of a GEM Tsonga is on the day. I think you've got to tip Tsonga to take it... but obviously anything can happen, and there's a chance of an upset.

Well, as was mentioned in the RG thread a while back, he suddenly had a name change from "Oleksandr Dolgopolov Jr" to "Alexandr Dolgopolov". The reasons could be many (distinguishing from Dolgo Sr who was also a tennis player? easier for westerners to pronounce?), but in any case it means he's technically not an "Olek" anymore... and "Alex" just seemed too confusing what with Alex Bogdanovic and Alex Ward, there are already a lot of Alex's around. So I asked my friend/tutor Olesya for Ukrainian diminuitives of the name and she said "Sashko".

Heh, FD, I don't consider it remotely impressive, however I do consider it an amusing tease as a conversation opener.