sydney 2007, day 2

well... it's really really hard to write about a day long after things have cooled off, but i will do some.

i went with an uncle to the tournament this day... happy to share my tickets with someone who has been kind to me lately, but it was a little weird cos our tennis watching interests and experience were very different LOL. he's happily entrenched in his centre court seat most of the day, and why not, the schedule was such that the not-so-interesting first rounds were being played and the only bigger names were concentrated in centre court. players like berdych, hingis, baghdatis... people he had heard of and had watched on tv. he did ventured out to watch a bit of patty schnyder for a while, and wondered why she's still playing at her age? hmm...

whereas i would rather pick out the grosjean v verdasco match on court 2 as my feature match of the day, as i was wearing my french supporter hat, and spent rest of my time around practice courts. there were other interests on the players' balcony at court 2 too, as seen in this picture... guess they were not verdasco's supporters!

but it turned out that fernando did not need extra support as he was in hot form and sebastien looked so slow playing him :( the score was 6-4 6-4 to fernando, and sebastien was trailing most of the time.

meanwhile hingis was losing to jelena jankovic on centre court, kicking off the soon-to-become exodus of big names from the tournament in early rounds... but i saw the last bit of that match and in the swiss miss's case, it wasn't for lack of trying.

i stayed on centre court for a little longer to see marcos baghdatis... again... after beijing not that long ago, so i have to admit that i was not that keen, but good to see him, always so amusing and fun to watch on court. and he must be the only player that sold tickets in the 'international section', as advertised by the tournament (did they actually ever sell those tickets? i have no idea) i never saw him again this week; he must like practising early in the mornings... ??

then the rest of the day... not that much left, we arrived after noon... i went off and caught some shirtless frenchmen (yes paulo you were right) hitting on practice courts. won't post those photos now, but if you're interested, watch out for them in the photo gallery ;)

for now, i'll just post this pic that i have promised to someone :)

thanks for reading, signing off.........

sydney 2007, qualifying saturday

"so you like the frenchmen?" - paulo

hey, tennis is back here at home! i decided to spend just a short morning at the tennis today to avoid the heat. a little star-gazing and practice with the camera and conditions, would be good enough for me...

so i saw a bit of my old favourite (whom the camera loves), feli lopez, losing to kevin kim in the first round of qualies, and behaving rather badly too at times.

more happily, i saw a few of the french gang supporting their countrymen, nicolas devilder and olivier patience, who played their matches on adjacent courts. first there was paulo (mathieu) and his coach(?), then sebastien grosjean, then emilie loit (i think?) came to join the party. surely they couldn't be practising all day, and good team spirit was essential! good to see seb back in sydney. i don't remember having met paulo before here though.

sadly both devilder and patience lost their matches. time for the guys to get back indoors to wait for the main draw...

many other lesser known guys battled on in the heat, but it's time for me to call it a day as well.

as usual, more pics will be available in a new gallery at vtp some time later... ;)

EXTRA: here's a pic of nicolas devilder, especially for you-know-who-you-are ;)