Rafael Nadal learns to stop worrying and tolerate the blue courts
Game Point is Busted Racquet's roundup of news, stats and links from around the web.
Love -- Whereas Novak Djokovic shied away from pre-tournament judgments about Madrid's blue clay courts and then ripped them after his first match, Rafael Nadal took the opposite tack. Following his easy 6-2, 6-2 opening-round win over longtime nemesis Nikolay Davydenko, Nadal avoided piling on the controversial courts. "If I lose here it's because I'm not as good as I should be, not because of the courts," he said, as reported by Lisa-Marie Burrows.
15 -- When big servers like John Isner and Marin Cilic (2.06 metres and 1.98 metres, respective and metrically) meet, a 7-6, 7-6 score is almost assumed, right? Wednesday's match ended that way, with Cilic handing the American the upset.
30 -- There's a women's tournament going on in Madrid too, not that you'd know it from television coverage. Venus Williams may as well have been a phantom, as neither of her two matches were broadcast on TV or the Internet. On Wednesday afternoon, Tennis Channel was airing a match between Nicolas Almagro and Marcel Granollers rather than the women's matchup between current No. 1 Victoria Azarenka and former No. 1 Ana Ivanovic. The WTA match isn't available online either. On the bright side, it appears that Thursday's match between Serena Williams and Caroline Wozniacki will be available for viewing. How novel!
40 -- Petra Kvitova lost her opening match in Madrid and drops to a 4-4 WTA record since advancing to the Australian Open semifinals.
Game -- As we wrote Monday, the courts and television coverage aren't the worst part of Madrid. That'd be the website. If you checked the site on Wednesday afternoon to see what time Roger Federer and Milos Raonic were playing, here's the information you'd have received:
