Thursday 20 July 2017

'STRANGE DAYS INDEED'

The current tournament being played in Newport, RI, USA has thrown up some interesting dialogue for someone like myself who sees things in names and scores that may be taken for granted by 'normal' people.
Take for instance a Round of 16 Mens Doubles match where no less than 76 letters put together made up the names of two combinations.
Adrian Menendez- Maceiras and Miguel Angel Reyes-Varela defeated
Sanchai Ratiwatana and Sonchat Ratiwatana  4-6, 6-3, 10-7. ( The score is irrelevant when these guys play against each other surely. Just listening to the umpire would be worth the price of admission ).
Now the win by Maceiras and Reyes- Varela was all to no avail as they were soundly beaten in the next round by Aisam-Ul-Haq Quereshi and Rajeev Ram 6-1, 6-2.
How do you reckon the umpire went in those two matches ?
Here's some more useless information for you.
Ram and Quereshi in fact won their first match by the score of 6-0, 6-0 over Roberto Maytin and Victor Estrella Burgos though there seems to be a fair discrepancy in the rankings here.
Ram and Quereshi own a combined ranking of 44 whereas their opponents own something that resembles a combined Test Cricket score of around 1100. Perhaps 0 and 0 was a fair result.
Matt Reid and 'Smithy' ( John- Patrick Smith ) of Australia had a win over another two guys with easy names to remember, Cheng- Peng Hsieh and Hsien-Yin Peng but this time it wasn't so much the names that made you take notice. Check the score. 4-6, 6-4, 22-20.
You gotta love that. I have made no secret of my thoughts on the current scoring system in singles. Time to spice it up, as they have done in doubles, no one can dominate the two on two format anymore in the smaller events.
Even Roger would struggle to dominate a singles format that finished with a first to ten super tie breaker in the third. I will keep dreaming on that idea......
Back to 'Smithy'.
John Smith is one of those names in Australia that most blokes after a few beers on a late night out in town would give to a Policeman if asked, 'Gday mate you are drunk and disorderly, what's your name' ? 'John Smith'. 'Yeah right, what's your real name' ??
I do believe that 'Smithy' may have lengthened his name for that reason alone.
The Hall Of Fame Open of 2017 has seen some entries this year that have been a Linguist's delight, a plethora of silly names that if you at closely enough will make you smile at their complexity.
Yet they can all play tennis, some obviously better than others.
Gerardo Lopez Villasenor also had a run at Newport as did Jeevan Nedunchezhiyan but none of these guys with the complicated names really troubled the score board too much, they just filled up a lot of space on the Draw Sheet.
In tennis there is more to just who wins though, in fact there's much, much more to tennis, you just have to look at it a bit more closely to appreciate the intricacies of it all.
Plus it helps if you own a strange mind like mine........


No comments:

Post a Comment