Andy Roddick suffers shock defeat in Paris

Andy Roddick saw the punch-line and its havoc-forming possibilities coming long before the person with the microphone had formed the question himself. On June 12, England will play the United States in the opening game of Group C in the World Cup finals and Roddick, well, he did not want to be lured into saying something he may later regret. Andy Murray has been there and it is not a nice place.
“I’ve got the British crowd on my side right now,” Roddick said, a reference to the reception he was given at the end of last year’s Wimbledon final and its tumultuous concluding set. “I’ve built up a lot of goodwill over the last couple of years and I don’t want to ruin that. I’m going to enjoy my sudden popularity in London and leave it at that.”
The American knows he will never quite form the affinity with the French that has become part-and-parcel of his relationships with those in Britain who admire him both for his sporting prowess and the fact that he has treated all of the deep frustration at losing three Wimbledon finals to Roger Federer with such open-hearted equanimity.
Once more, his excursion to Paris lasted but for a brief few days. At the first changeover yesterday he complained that the backstop tarpaulins were so wet that any ball that landed in them was bound to grow heavier - “I’ve complained about this for the last ten years,” he muttered. At the next, he plucked two polythene-wrapped rackets from his bag and threw them across the dirt suggesting that their string tensions were all wrong.
Thus, when the world No.8 and No.6 seed was defeated in straight sets, the levels of surprise were not that high. That he lost to Teimuraz Gabashvili, a qualifier from Georgia, though, was a little less credible.
Gabashvili had never been beyond the second round of a grand slam tournament before – now he is into the fourth round of the men’s championship, the last of the qualifiers whose 6-4, 6-4, 6-2 victory was the best of his career and maintained his record of not dropping a set in the championships to date.
Roddick could point to the fact that he had not had one match on clay before landing in Paris as reason for his sub-standard performance. After his victory in the Sony Ericsson Open in Miami, he chose to celebrate his first wedding anniversary rather than playing in either Monte Carlo or Rome (Hawaii was not a bad substitute, especially as his wife is one of the world’s most photographed swim-suit models). Roddick did arrive in Madrid, only to fall victim to food poisoning.
It would be unfair to describe him as a fish out of water on clay, for he has only swum in the shallows of this event. For him, the French Open is a means of getting a few miles on the clock, fine tune his game, work himself into form and prepare to strike on the grass where his form and fortunes in the past few summers has been prodigious.
Larry Stefanki, his coach, has described Court Suzanne Lenglen as a sandpit and he is not far wrong. “It’s the slowest one here,” Roddick said. “It’s a fun court as far as the people viewing but the way it plays just doesn’t help me out much. That’s all. That’s fine. It’s just my personal preference is all. I have to deal with it and play through it.”
Gabashvili will meet Jurgen Melzer of Austria in the last 16, not a match that many would have envisioned when the draw was made. Gabashvili was still involved in the qualifying competition then he eschewed the suggestion that it couldn’t get any better than beating a top ten player. “My best match was the second round of qualifying against Thierry Ascione (of France). It was unbelievable, I won 6-2, 6-0, I made 31 winners and only seven errors, so it was a crazy match. Today was very good – but not the best.”
Neither was Novak Djokovic purring but the world No.3, still clearly suffering from the allergies that seem to affect him most severely on the clay, secured a place in the fourth round when he defeated Romania’s Victor Hanescu 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 in two hours and 38 minutes of tennis played in intermittent drizzle.
Source:The Times