When I wasn’t working on coding or checking out what’s been going on at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit this past two weeks, I’ve been spending my free time keeping track of this year’s Wimbledon tennis championship in London.
I just got done watching the Men’s singles final about an hour ago and I have to say it was one of the most impressive matches I’ve seen. Andy Roddick has often played a distant second fiddle to Roger Federer in grass court matches but today Andy was playing at an absolutely incredible level.
He forced a decisive fifth set, which in Wimbledon (among other tournaments) cannot end on a tiebreak. Federer served first and both players held their own serve for 29 games in a row. From after the third game Andy Roddick won, if he dropped serve at any point from there the match would have been effectively over, and after his fifth game his service games really were sudden death. He managed to hang on for 14 games before finally being broken by Roger Federer, who won Wimbledon 5-7 7-6(6) 7-6(2) 3-6 16-14.
That was the only time he broke Andy Roddick’s serve the entire game. Andy Roddick broke Roger Federer twice, in the first and fourth sets but was not able to win the tiebreakers in the second or third sets. In the second set Andy Roddick was up 6-2 in the tiebreak but lost 6 points in a row to lose the set.
I know Roddick is probably devastated right now thinking about how close he came to finally grabbing the Wimbledon title (he lost to Federer in 2004 and 2005) but this tennis fan at least has noticed how improved his game is this year. Hopefully there will be more top-10 players from the American men’s side soon because although Roddick is doing well he can’t keep it up forever.