Rafael Nadal losing at the French Open 2009 Photo by Matthew Stockman/Getty Images

Rafael Nadal’s hopes of winning another French Open in 2009 are finished.

Robin Soderling has played an excellent match and managed to dethrone the king of clay by 3 sets to 1.

I didn’t see the match today (only the last tie-break) so I cannot comment much, but from what I saw, Soderling played the right tactics; attack Nadal’s short balls and stay in the long rallies when he had to.

I believe Nadal got this aura of getting everything back and passing on every ball, but that’s of course not true.

He is just a human and doesn’t get every ball back and doesn’t pass you every time you come to the net.

Soderling showed no fear of Nadal’s passing shots and scrambling ability and kept attacking the same way as he would any other player.

Soderling played the ball and not the name. That’s an important lesson for every tennis player who competes in tournaments. (more…)

I got reasonably good seats on my day 5 at Roland Garros at Suzanne Lenglen court, so I stayed almost the whole day at this court.

The favorites on this court all won, but I saw that Djokovic was beaten by Kohlschreiber 3:0 which is a big surprise. Will have to check some stats and interviews to see what happened…

But the first match today on Suzanne Lenglen court was…

Svetlana Kuznetsova : Melinda Czink 6-1, 6-3

Svetlana didn’t have many problems with Melinda. As soon as she got the ball to her forehand, the point was almost over. When she added a few more backhand winners down the line, it was just too much for Czink.

While I was watching those monster forehands from Kuznetsova, I wondered what would happen, if a top ATP player, a clay court specialist, let’s say Tommy Robredo would play only to Kuznetsova forehand, what would the score be? (more…)

The doubles are in full swing at Roland Garros and Andreja Klepac, the last player from Slovenia left in the tournament was on court today.

She and her partner Ekaterina Dzehalevich were up against A. Medina Garrigues and Virginia Ruano Pascual, the third seeds.

Andreja and Ekaterina started the match nervously, making bad mistakes while the girls from Spain played solid, high percentage tennis with no special shots.

The second set was more competitive as Andreja and Ekaterina realized that they had to attack and it was just the experience of Anabel and Virginia that got them the second set. (more…)

The third day of my stay at Roland Garros was very much about French tennis players. The biggest match for the French on this day was the Tsonga – Monaco match which Tsonga won in 4 sets.

The atmosphere at the Suzanne Lenglen court was great and French fans were jumping from joy and disappointment, depending on what Tsonga did with the ball.

Monaco didn’t play poorly but Tsonga was in his element; serving 63% of the first serves in and most of these were over 200 km/h.

It will be interesting to see if the long term statistics catches up with Tsonga on this tournament where he won’t be able to hit so many first serves and hit so many forehands on the lines… (more…)

This is day 2 of my visit to Roland Garros and I managed to see the whole match of Polona Hercog of Slovenia and Aravane Rezai of France.

Polona used different spins, slices, speeds and heights to disturb the rhythm of Aravane Rezai in the first set but then Rezai got used to this game and simply overpowered Polona.

Polona has a some great weapons; her kick serve is very effective on clay, her forehand is versatile, controlled and quite fast, and she is one of the few girls on the tour that plays backhand slice really well.

Her top spin backhand is not that good for this level of tennis and it will be exploited over and over again if she plays top 50 WTA players. (more…)

This is day 1 of my tennis blogging from Roland Garros and it wasn’t a nice welcome. When I arrived to Paris at around 11 am, it was raining and was quite cold.

The rain stopped later but the wind kept blowing and it was quite a difficult day to play tennis.

Many players were struggling with conditions and most of them knew what they had to do in the wind; play high percentage tennis, don’t go for the lines and work for every point.

If the player had the wind in the back, he or she mostly just kept good deep shots in play and the opponent sooner or later played a short ball – against the wind.

Then it was only the matter of not overhitting the short ball. (more…)

Roger Federer got the better of Rafael Nadal in today’s final of the Madrid Masters 2009. And this win was a long time coming…

Roger wins against Nadal on clay Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images

The last time Federer beat Nadal was in 2007 Masters Cup semifinal, when Roger won 6:4, 6:1.

If you want to check all the matches they played, then see this excellent article about the Federer – Nadal rivalry at the atpworldtour.com. (more…)

Rafael Nadal has again won the final against Novak Djokovic, this time in Rome. Nadal already won in Monte Carlo against Djokovic and is of course the current #1 player in the world.

But I don’t like to see him there. It’s not that he doesn’t deserve his #1 spot.

He does, but not because he beats his opponents with better tennis, but because his opponents beat themselves.

I would like to see the best player in the world to be a better player than his opponents.

He should be able to attack and exploit all types of weakness and be able to win points in a variety of ways. Roger Federer is the perfect example of what a #1 player in the world should play like.

Roger Federer is able to play any tactic he wants and he can play any shot he wants – and of course he is a master of all of them.

But Rafael Nadal plays different tennis.

The tie-break of the first set in the Rome 2009 final is a great example how Nadal plays and how he wins. I’ll break it down shot by shot so that you can see what goes on… (more…)