FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — Prior to Wednesday night’s secon
d-round match against Janko Tipsarevic, Andy Roddick and coach Larry Stefanki put together a cheat sheet. A-Rod was quite familiar with the enigmatic Serb’s high-risk/high-reward offensive. They had met twice before, both times on the lawns of the All England Club. Roddick had taken the first encounter, a first-rounder in ’06, but Tipsarevic had claimed the latter, taking down the Texan in the second round in ’08. The Roddick-Stefanki game plan read something like this:
1. Keep the unforced errors to a minimum. Check.
2. Keep Tipsarevic on the move and force him to go for big shots from stretch positions. Check
3. Put a high percentage of returns in play. Check.
So how did the world No. 9 come out on the short end of a 3-6, 7-5, 6-3, 7-6(4) decision? Was it the mono? Did he just get outplayed?
“I thought I hit the ball pretty well,” insisted Roddick, who, despite his recent ailments, came into the match with an ATP-best mark of 34-7 on hard court in 2010. “I thought he played very high-risk and executed for four sets. I kept telling myself, ‘You know, this has to have an expiration date on it.'”
But the 26-year-old Tipsarevic, a hot-and-cold player who has yet to capitalize on his obvious talents (he’s a sub-.500 130-133 lifetime), never went away, and he finished the night with an impressive 66/30 ratio of winners to unforced errors. For his part, Roddick put 73 percent of his returns in play, finished with a respectable 23 unforced errors, and totaled 16 aces on the night. But there was a notable lack of energy from the 28-year-old, who, for the second straight year, failed to reach the second week in Flushing Meadows. But Roddick didn’t use his recent mono diagnosis as an excuse.
“There’s nothing there,” he said. “We’re not talking about it if I win a match. I’m not going to talk about it because I lost it…He was in a groove. He was seeing the ball big and he was taking risky cuts at the ball. They seemed to be dropping, the majority of them.”
“In Wimbledon, when I won, I felt that I was lucky and that Andy choked on important moments,” said Tipsarevic, who advance to the third round of a Grand Slam for the first time since Roland Garros in ’09. “But here I feel it was a different story. From my point of view, it was a high-quality match, especially in the fourth set…Normally, he starts off too defensive, and then when he sees that things are not going his way, he starts playing aggressive. That’s when he’s really dangerous.”
Trailing 5-2 in the third set, Roddick was called for a foot fault. But when he asked the lineswoman which foot it was, she said it was the right.
“That’s impossible,” Roddick fired back. Had she said it was the left foot, the conversation might have ended there.
“I just expect my umpires to know the left foot from the right foot,” said Roddick. “Find me any tape where my right foot has ever landed in front of my left foot on the serve…I was just stupefied.”
But other than energizing Roddick, the call had little bearing on a match in which Tisparevic was clearly in the driver’s seat.
“He was pissed off,” Tipsarevic observed. “I would be if a referee told me I made a foot-fault with my right leg. I mean, he never moves his right leg, so it was just a stupid call. But I feel he was trying to do something to change the match, to get the crowd involved or whatever. But if I remember, it really didn’t.”
Roddick, who took the year off from Davis Cup in order to concentrate on the Slams — Wimbledon and the U.S. Open in particular — will likely take some time off and reassess his goals after a mostly disappointing year in which his best Slam result was the Australian Open quarterfinals.
“It’s unfortunate,” said Roddick. “I missed the last four months of last year and I’ve been dealing with this for a little bit. It’s been a short year as far as all things being perfect at one time. You know, hasn’t really been that way too often. It’s disappointing.”
Tipsarevic will next meet Frenchman Gael Monfils, a 6-3, 6-4, 6-3 winner over Russia’s Igor Andreev.
