Tebbutt: Doubles disappointment for Canada

 

The people arriving for Saturday’s doubles (above), with the drum-line from the Sardis Secondary School in Chilliwack, B.C. pounding out a mean beat, were in for a minor surprise.

 

The declared line-ups for Saturday’s action were Daniel Nestor and Vasek Pospisil for Canada and Michael Llodra and Julien Benneteau for France.

 

When I left the Thunderbird Sports Centre on Friday night with a bunch of French reporters, they were all convinced that Jo-Wilfried Tsonga would be substituted for Benneteau – he and Llodra had clobbered Feliciano Lopez and Fernando Verdasco 6-1, 6-2, 6-0 in France’s last Davis Cup outing in Spain last September.

 

They also felt strongly that Raonic, who had looked so impressive in beating Benneteau in Friday’s singles, would be alongside Nestor in place of Pospisil who had been outclassed by Tsonga.

 

The surprise turned out to be Raonic substituting for Canada while captain Guy Forget went with the planned duo of Llodra and Benneteau, instead of bringing in the heavy-hitting Tsonga.

 

 

There will be some second-guessing as a result of Llodra and Benneteau defeating Nestor and Raonic 7-6(1), 7-6(2), 6-3 but I don’t think too much of it will come from the Canadian team. Captain Martin Laurendeau basically said that his boys hoped to keep riding the Milos wave that started with a tournament title in Chennai, India, the first week in January and continued through a third-round finish at the Aussie Open and then a fine performance against Benneteau in Friday’s singles.

 

Nestor said he was in on the decision, which was made on Friday night by after a pow-wow of all those concerned, and used the word “obvious to describe the choice of Raonic over Pospisil.

 

There was, as mentioned above, a chance Tsonga would play. With him just having beaten Pospisil decisively, it would have made it tough for Laurendeau to send him out again against the world No. 6, even if it was in doubles.

 

 

Llodra is a fine doubles player, almost as good as Nestor and evener closer to him in a Davis Cup week when he can just concentrate on doubles and not worry about singles – his career high singles ranking was No. 21 in May of last year. So it was always going to be a very tough match-up.

 

It is easy to analyze the match in many ways, but I thought the first point of the opening-set tiebreak was very revealing. There was a high floating ball through the middle that normally should have been a fairly easy overhead smash put-away. But neither Nestor or Raonic (being left-handed and right-handed respectively) had their obvious smash in position. Both hesitated and finally Nestor just bunted the ball back with his backhand to keep the rally going. The Canadians would eventually lose a point they were in a position to win and go down a mini-break right off the bat.

 

Two good serves by Llodra and the French lead 3-0 on the way to 5-0 and a 7-1 victory.

 

 

“I told them the match would be decided by the little details,” said Forget and Llodra and Benneteau. “Raonic and Nestor are such good servers that it would be a matter of a net cord, a good shot by one team or a miss by the other. You can play a set for an hour and then it can all be decided in one minute – and that’s what happened.”

 

With no service breaks in the first two sets – and only three breaks points for the Canadians were on Benneteau’s serve in the fourth game of the match – another tiebreak decided the second set. In that one, Benneteau hit a beauty backhand down-the-line to get the mini-break to 2-1 and he and Llodra did not look back, taking it 7-2.

 

The die had been cast. After it taking more than two hours to play the first two sets, a break of Nestors serve in the third game and of Raonic’s in the ninth, and the final set ended in little over a half hour in favour of the French.

 

While Nestor and Raonic would like to have returned serve better, their main failing was decidedly poor serving. Their team first-serve percentage was 55 per cent – to 70 per cent for the French players – and that is not good in singles but even worse in doubles when teams usually try for a higher percentage.

 

Benneteau said that he may have been helped by having faced the Raonic serve the previous day and by the fact that he and Llodra are good friends and have played together quite often. Nestor basically said that the Frenchman outplayed him and Raonic and that it would likely have been the same had he played with Pospisil.

 

 

There was again a very supportive 5,000 plus crowd on the campus of the University of British Columbia cheering on Nestor and Raonic (above).

 

Only really in the seventh game of the first set was there anything close to poor sportsmanship when a Canadian fan loudly shouted, “You suck, Llodra” as a point was about to start. “Please don’t call out and insult the other team,” intoned umpire Jake Garner of the United States. He didn’t have to say anything, the crowd instantly reacted in a manner that made it abundantly clear that it did not approve of the heckler.

 

So, now it comes down to the two singles on Sunday, Raonic against Tsonga and then Monfils versus Posposil, if the tie is still alive. Forget said it is “very improbable” that it will not be Monfils replacing Benneteau.

 

Raonic, with top-10 wins this year already over Janko Tipsarevic and Nicolas Almagro, is a worthy match for Tsonga. He said that he will do what Tsonga will also try to do in the match – impose his game.