Day 297: Opening Round

Prior to going to Healesville the day before I had stopped by Federation Square and waited in line for awhile to get a day pass ticket for the Australian Open for the following day. The day pass ticket lets you hop between any of the matches going on other than the ones in the two big stadiums, and since all 3 of the Canadian matches going on during the day were on the outer courts, it was a pretty inexpensive (especially by Australian standards) way of getting to watch some tennis and have a fun day out.

It was one of the hottest days since I'd gotten to Melbourne, but still quite comfortable. The Open is only a short walk from the city center, so I joined the flow of people walking down.

The first match I went to, at 11am was between Rebecca Marino and Shuai Peng. It was one of the smallest courts with maybe only 60 people watching, and not surprisingly the bulk of the crowd was Chinese, cheering for Peng. The loudest and most amusing of all the fans were two Australian guys dressed up and painted in Chinese flags who had loud and often elaborate cheers in mandarin almost every stop in play. In the end, Peng was just a lot better than Marino and the match was a bit of a blowout.

The next match was Milos Raonic vs. Jan Hajek. It was on the larger Show Court 2, and while it's nothing compared to the stadiums it was still a large crowd. My take on the game is that Milos, as expected, has a devastating serve and had a huge physical edge, but he still made a lot of unforced errors when it got to rallys, and he seems to give up on plays a lot. It's hard to tell much from watching a single match, but Milos could bail himself out when he fell behind a bit on his serve by just acing his opponent over and over. In the end Milos won in 4 sets.

The last full game I watched was Jesse Lavine and Tommy Robredo. This was the most entertaining game of the day for me, as it was pretty evenly matched and there were lots of rallying and net play. Neither player was terribly physically dominating, but they both worked hard and were always running. Lavine ultimately won it in 4 sets, but two of the sets ended in tie-breaks and the other two only had one servìce break in them. Overall the Canadians went 2-1, which isn't bad, even if it was only the opening round.

I watched bits and pieces of a few other matches going on throughout the day, but only watched the Canadian matches all the way through. Afterwards I walked back to Federation Square where they were playing the tennis on a giant screen and watched a few of the main court games from there.