So, like most of the British public, I have little interest in tennis for the vast majority of the year. I keep up with the grand slams, and make it my business to know who the top players are, but that's pretty much it. But as soon as Wimbledon comes around, I'm hooked like that bloke in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This year is no exception, and it's been a bizarre tournament so far. Players are retiring through injury left, right and centre (some blame the courts, others defend the surface), and the likes of Sharapova, Nadal and Federer have been knocked out in the first two rounds. Yet Serena Williams remain in this tournament of surprise exits, so clearly the tennis gods are waiting to serve something up for her (if you'll pardon the pun. If you're going to be following this blog you're going to have to be pardoning a lot of them) for saying some truly stupid shit about rape. Then again, if karma existed in sport, Argentina's tally of World Cups would be at zero.
Speaking of the World Cup, I and a lot of my generation have fond memories of the 2002 tournament, mainly because due to the time difference, the games took place in the morning by UK time, which meant that we got to watch some of the England matches at school, our teachers having (probably rightly) assumed that kids would play truant so they could watch our boys in action, if they didn't have the option of sitting in the school hall at 7:30am eating bacon butties and watching, respectively, an agonisingly boring 0-0 draw with Nigeria and a merely agonising 2-1 defeat to Brazil. This concession wasn't enough for those of us who would rather watch a mid-morning Turkey-China matchup than attend lessons on algebra and the possessive apostrophe, but it was a nice thought.
As we all know, nostalgia is a powerful force. Just because an eleven-year-old me had a great time down at the schoolyard discussing Spain's chances with our exchange student Julio, doesn't mean that the tournament itself was necessarily a good one. The 2002 World Cup was marked by a ridiculous number of shocks; Portugal, Argentina and defending champions France crashed out in the group stages (France in particular failing so hard that it remains unmatched in their history, though they had a damn good try in 2010). Italy lost in the second round to co-hosts South Korea, who ended up reaching the semis, dispatching current footballing nonpareils Spain on penalties in the quarters. Other surprise quarter-finalists included Turkey, Senegal and the USA. The connection with this year's Wimbledon should be obvious, which brings me to my main line of inquiry; does a great number of shock defeats for the favourites devalue a tournament?
I'm aware this may seem paradoxical, considering that earlier this week I praised Tahiti's presence at the Confederations Cup, but then Tahiti were first-round cannon fodder. They didn't beat anybody, whereas the likes of Michelle Larcher de Brito, Sergey Stakhovsky and Steve Darcis definitely, memorably did. I love it when teams such as Senegal make it to the World Cup and want them to succeed, but at the same time I want the favourites to do well; seeing some of the best players in the world underperform, as so many of them did in 2002, is honestly fairly dispiriting. I would far rather watch Rafael Nadal at full throttle, playing like we all know he can and taking tennis to new and thrilling heights, than a Nadal clearly struggling with injury losing to a player he should be beating, regardless of how well his opponent did to win (and Steve Darcis played the game of his life). A big tournament like Wimbledon or the World Cup is on one hand about drama, and shocks provide that. But it's also about the pursuit of excellence, and ideally I'd like a championship final to be between the best in the world that year. It feels wrong saying this; after all, I'm British and as a nation we love an outsider. I've yet to speak to anybody who thinks that this year's Wimbledon is the better for the loss of Sharapova, Federer and Nadal by the middle of the first week.
And yet, for sport to mean anything it must be a meritocracy. On the day, Steve Darcis outplayed Rafael Nadal. Stakhovsky outplayed Federer and de Brito outplayed Sharapova. In 2002, Senegal outplayed France. The USA outplayed Portugal. South Korea didn't outplay Spain and Italy, but the referees seemed to be very sympathetic to them due to their being a) the underdogs (Tahiti maybe got away with a few fouls last week that a team like Uruguay would have been penalised for) and b) the host nation (see also: Manchester United; Old Trafford; Penalties; Mike Riley). When a team is lucky, as South Korea were, then a win over a top team often leaves a bad taste in the mouth. But in sport, and particularly in tennis, the better team or player nearly always wins. Teams like France and Argentina didn't acclimatise well to the conditions in the Far East. Teams like Turkey and a relatively unfancied Germany did, so they went through. Stakhovsky may have been younger and hungrier than Federer on the day, and was certainly the better player. It's a shame when the top stars of a sport underperform, but you can't begrudge their conquerors their success (unless they're South Korea, evidently). Much as great sportsmen and sportswomen excelling in their chosen field is thrilling, so too was Papa Bouba Diop's winning goal for Senegal against France in the opening game in 2002, and the team's subsequent delighted, dancing celebrations.
I think, in the end, it all comes down to balance (and I'm aware that by writing these words I've disqualified myself from a post as a sports correspondent for Fox News). Shocks are precious because they're comparatively rare. The title wins of the unseeded Boris Becker and Goran Ivanisevic at Wimbledon were fantastic because the tournament is so often won by one of the top few seeds. The same goes for Ghana's run at the 2010 World Cup, in which they were a penalty kick away from the semi-finals. In a field of top teams (Spain, Germany, the Netherlands) performing to the best of their capabilities, it was amazing to see an outfit like Ghana emerge as the last underdog standing. When there are so many shocks, as in 2002, where in seemingly every match it was a toss-up as to who would win, it does devalue the tournament to a certain extent, but more than that, it devalues the power of the shock itself to move us and to thrill us. Only time will tell whether this year's Wimbledon will follow the same pattern as the Japan/South Korea World Cup, or whether the top seeds Djokovic and Serena will find their names on the trophy after all. But as a (fairweather) tennis fan, I'd rather Nadal and Federer were still in the competition, and with the greatest respect to players like Sergey Stakhovsky and Tsonga's conqueror Ernests Gulbis, a year in which they found themselves playing each other in the semi-finals would be a poor year for the Championships in a lot of ways.
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