by My father is making a quicker recovery that he or any of us expected, and maybe, just maybe, my parents will come over in the autumn. I don’t want to put any pressure on Dad though. Just flying all this way and back will take a lot out of him. But right now Timișoara is full of life and sound and flavour and colour, and I wish Mum and Dad could be here to experience it. In short, I miss them.
There’s both a jazz festival and a traditional music festival going on at the moment. Every year the performers from the traditional music festival announce themselves by parading up and down the square, and past my window. It’s a beautiful sight, and sound. Last night I checked out the festival, but I got there late because I’d been watching tennis, and didn’t have the greatest of vantage points. Too many advantage points, you could say. The singers and musicians and dancers mostly come from nearby countries, but my favourite act was from Colombia. (In Romanian, they spell this as Columbia, with a U, and the more I think about it, the more it would make sense if we did the same in English.) Colombia as a country sounds awesome, by the way. Tonight I’ll pop along to the last night of the show in plenty of time (no tennis!) and grab some food and beer from the numerous stands.
Middle Sunday. In some ways it’s my favourite day of Wimbledon. Unless the first week is seriously weather-affected, as it was in 1997 and on a couple of other occasions, there’s no play on that day, and that gives me a chance to catch up on all the other stuff.
Yesterday I saw quite a few matches, or chunks of them at least. Access to a stream was just about mandatory. The Tour de France had started, so only one channel on Eurosport showed the tennis, and they have a horrible habit of chopping and changing matches at will, and often at crucial stages.
The first match I saw was Sam Querrey against John Millman. Querrey loves the grass, and something about his playing style made it look all too easy. I never liked watching Pete Sampras, partly because he rarely seemed to have to work for his points, and Querrey is in a similar mould. The American had greater weight of shot, but Millman competed admirably, and took his opponent to two tie-breaks, the second of which was 10-8. The final score (a straight-set win for Querrey) didn’t do justice to the closeness of the match.
Then I dropped in on Elise Mertens’ draining encounter with Wang Qiang. They were in the midst of a gripping second-set tie-break, which Wang eventually squeaked 11-9 to level the match. Half-way through the third set, figures of 107 total points apiece appeared on the screen. This was to highlight how evenly matched the players were, but I was thinking, 214! That’s a huge number for two and a half sets. And very few of the points were cheap. No wonder they were so tired. Mertens played slightly better on the big points in the final set, and just held on for the win. This was an absorbing battle.
Mertens would play the winner of Kiki Bertens and Barbora Strycova. As fun as it would have been for the commentators to deal with Mertens and Bertens squaring off, I wanted to see Strycova win, which she did. I saw her play (and win) in New York in 2015, and I enjoyed her playing style which comes from being relatively short. She can’t rely on big shots; she has to scamper and craft points. Bertens, who has all the weapons, wasn’t at her best, and after a tight first set, Strycova won quite comfortably.
I think I like watching the shorter players in general, on both the men’s and women’s sides. Next up was Diego Schwartzman, a top-25 player despite being only five foot seven. He played a fantastic match against the much bigger Matteo Berrettini, generating surprising power on his groundstrokes. He was also deadly accurate. Schwartzman led by two sets to one, and had three match points on Berrettini’s serve in the fourth set. Berrettini, who wasn’t exactly having a bad day either, saved them all, took the ensuing tie-break 7-5, and then won a series of close games at the start of the fifth. Berrettini, leading 4-2 in the decider, came up with a couple of howlers on his serve to almost let Schwartzman back in, but again he was able to serve his way out of trouble. It was a shame the little guy lost by the finest of margins having played so well, but it was a terrific match, lasting over 4¼ hours.
I got back from the music festival to see another little guy by tennis standards, Dan Evans of Birmingham, complete his match against João Sousa. Evans (five foot nine) went down 6-4 in the fifth, and his reaction as he dumped a backhand in the net after chasing down Sousa’s drop shot on match point was priceless. The No. 1 Court crowd had obviously been treated to a fantastic match.
I expect that’ll be the most tennis I’ll watch on one day for a while.
