Surprise politics

So, Douglas Robson reports that the United Arab Emirates has denied Israeli player Andy Ram a visa for the Dubai Duty Free Masters 500 tournament, which begins on 23 February.

This is the excrement hitting the fan, isn't it? If this is true, clearly the UAE isn't concerned about the media reaction to its refusal to let Shahar Peer enter the country. It has adopted a stance and the WTA and the ATP need to decide rather swiftly how they are going to address this. The top players need to decide how they're going to address this too. Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer would obviously rather eat live snakes than get bogged down in a political mess like this, but if they actually don't react to this it's going to send a message to the UAE, and any other country, that as long as there is sponsorship, players will come. Even if their fellows are discriminated against. 

Players say sports shouldn't be about politics and I generally agree, except that sometimes, everything is about politics, two men hitting a green fuzzy ball over a net included, and there's no getting away from that.

From the article, it's also pretty obvious that the ATP knew this had happened to Ram last year too. It's not a new problem and hopefully the ATP has developed a strategy to deal with similar problems this year (something better than just persuading Israeli players to just not go), although the change of CEO this year can't have made strategy setting easy . Is this where we get to see what sort of stuff Adam Helfant is made of?

Rotterdam

That was a difficult match to watch - turns out Rafa has some sort of knee injury, which got steadily worse throughout the match, until by the third set it was actually dreadful to watch because he could hardly get about the court. Sad. I think he kept playing out of respect for Mandy though-- it being the final-- because it would've pretty much robbed Mandy of the win if he'd retired. 6-3 4-6 6-0 to Mand.  

In the awards ceremony Mandy was very sweet and made Rafa smile in a goofy way behind his bunch of flowers. (Youtube of the trophy ceremony) He said:  

"Sorry to Rafa, I know he hurt his leg. It shows how good a player he is - he was still managing to beat me on one leg." 

Are they descended from puppies? Too cute.

'How come I only get this little pie tin?'

Images via Getty and Elmundo

This picture really needs no comment

Looking forwards

It's odd to think that before the AO, so much was said about how quickly men's tennis was changing. Of course, it will change. But at the moment, men's tennis seems still all about Roger and Rafa. I'm not sorry about that. I want to know how their story unfolds in 2009.  

Rafael Nadal

Hot, sweating... perfect.

AO 2009 - the aftermath

Well, that was exciting, wasn't it? 

Rafael Nadal is only the fourth man to win major singles titles on three different surfaces, after Jimmy Connnors, Mats Wilander and Andre Agassi. Unlike those people, who did it over a number of years, he's actually the first ever man to win major singles titles on three different surfaces in one year. I shuffled over to wikipedia to check this out and as far as I can tell it's true. No other man has ever done this, not even Rod Laver, because he won his grand slams on two surfaces. Rafa is a phenomenon.  

But, not only is he quite good at tennis, here's a man who also finds time to organise his commemorative stuffed wombats into his trophies during high pressure moments.

 

Oh and while I'm here posting about tennis related geekery, here's a really fascinating breakdown of the 2009 AO final. It uses a system to calculate effectiveness of play called the 'aggressive margin', but added to this is a breakdown of each time Roger and Rafa played a shot in order to force the other into error.

pic from Corbis