Martina Navratilova, who won a ton of Slams, used to say the women had it tougher to win Slams.  In a best of 3 situation, you can’t have a mental lapse.  To be fair, the top women often have greater power or speed, especially during the Evert-Navratilova era.  The women past 5 were so much weaker in pace than the top women.  The men, even lower ranked ones, have power, but usually lack consistency.

Roger Federer’s record of 23 straight semifinals would not have been possible without a best of 5 format.  Federer squeaked out quite a few matches in five sets.

Federer’s first round match was against Alejandro Falla.  The two had met twice in the last month or so.  A somewhat tight first set at the French, but a straight set win, followed by an easy win in Halle.  No one expected Falla to give Federer any trouble, but it seems a larger number of players that were winless against Federer have broken through.  Falla was hoping to be one of those players.

Falla tried two strategies.  Being a lefty and seeing the success of Nadal swinging that serve to Fed’s backhand, Falla tried the same.  He also chose to attack the Federer second serve.  Falla would break Federer late in the first set, then again in the middle of the second set, and Federer would be down two sets to love.  In the third set, Falla had break points but converted none, and Federer got a break.  In the fourth set, they broke each other once, but by the end Falla seemed to be tiring and unable to hang in and lost the fifth set at love.

Mardy Fish continued his winning ways over Australian, Bernie Tomic, in straight sets, but had a close tiebreak in the second set.  Monfils also beat Mayer in straight sets.  Ljubicic was the first seed to fall in straight sets to Pole, Przysiezny.  German Daniel Brands beat Igor Andreev in straight sets.  Schuettler had an easy straight set win over Tursunov who is far from playing the kind of tennis that brought him to the top 20.  Cilic fell in straight sets to Florian Mayer showing his lack of skill on the grass.  Feliciano Lopez needed 4 sets to beat American Jesse Levine.  Young Lithuanian Ricardas Berankis beat hard hitting Carsten Ball in four sets.  Melzer won in four sets over Dustin Brown of Jamaica.

Davydenko is in a tight five setter against tall Kevin Anderson, one of the few guys that have height similar to Isner or Karlovic.  Anderson took the first two sets.  Davydenko took the second two sets.  They are on serve in the fifth.

Davydenko was off for a few months recovering from a wrist fracture, but is now hitting with a Dunlop racquet and wearing Dunlop clothes.  He got a contract with Dunlop at the start of the year.  Davydenko is one of those players with a minimal amount of contracts for a man of his ranking, and like other Russians, would play more tournaments (like Kafelnikov) to earn more coin.