SU thoroughly enjoyed the men’s finals last night in Flushing Meadow. It was like a Davis Cup environment with about 97% of the crowd enthusiastically behind Federer to the point that they were cheering service faults by Djokovic. I must admit I have never seen that before in any tournament other than Davis Cup ties. To Djokovic’s credit, he just dealt with it. Even in the post-match press conference, he didn’t make the crowd into an issue. He basically said that Federer deserved to have the crowd behind him for his long career and behavior on and off the court, and that Djokovic could only hope to work on getting that type of support later on his career. SU loves that no excuses mentality. And the truth is, when he is 34 and competing with the next generation players, the crowd will give him his due. This guy is just a class act.
Federer is still performing at an incredibly high level at 34 years of age and clearly keeps himself in great shape. Quite a contrast to someone like Andy Roddick who retired at a relatively early age. As I have said before, for men’s tennis, this is a golden age with a stable of so many top, top players that we won’t ever see again.
SU read that Djokovic watched the movie “300” the night before the finals which stars Gerard Butler. Butler was in Djokovic’s friends’ box for the match and they had this brief reaction after the match. Djokovic is not your robot player and has a lot of personality. SU got a kick out of this:
Meanwhile, the Giants tortured its fans with questionable end-of-game clock management and gave new meaning to the term “prevent defense” in the last 90 seconds. Eli of all people who is always credited with being cerebral just made a dumb play by not taking the sack on 3rd down. The reality is that it won’t matter long term as their defense is not good but you have to be smarter than that.
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The Steelers could take some lessons from Djokovic. No excuses. Just play.
I enjoyed the match a great deal as well. Got a bit tired of the McEnroes endless discussion of the SABR. I can take john because that is just who he is but the repetition by Patrick just gets to be too much. They keep waiting for someone to be playing poorer than expected so they can jump on that topic. John is usually right on the money but too much repeating. Sounded like Mike from the FAN.
Regarding last night Giants’ game, all of the criticism has been directed at Manning for not taking a sack (a clear error, but understandable in the heat of battle) and Spagnola for his defense at the end of the game ( largely 20-20 hindsight). The biggest blunder has largely been ignored — Coughlin’s decision to kick a field goal, rather than go for it on fourth down. By doing so, he gave up a very good chance to win the game, in order to avoid a tie. That’s crazy !
Steve, unfortunately, the news in today’s paper is pretty dismal. Lots of blame to go around. How can all of the coaches not be aware of how many timeouts Dallas had left? And how were Eli and Coughlin not on the same page on the 3rd down play?