For those too cold of eye and heart to accept that emotion is a significant part of winning in sport, the first afternoon of the 2014 Davis Cup final gave the lie. It began with Stanislas Wawrinka winning for Switzerland after nearly succumbing to another “Cry baby” jibe from the crowd, and ended with a towering win by Gaël Monfils for France over Roger Federer, whose back held up better than his tennis.
To mangle the old joke, imagine you went to a football stadium and a tennis match broke out – with all of the noise but none of the trouble [as when Everton visited Lille last month]. That’s what happened here on Friday in two matches that bubbled with enough drama to fill a host of stadiums.
Having blitzed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the first set of the opening encounter, Wawrinka could hardly have missed the cruel, lone shriek of, “Cry baby, cry!” that pierced a split-second silence in Stade Pierre Mauroy near the start of the second.
The world No 4 won the next point but Tsonga rattled off three games in a row and levelled the fight at a set apiece. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the Frenchman, who looked wrecked in the first set, was playing a fellow inmate in the house of suffering, this one built on light brown clay under heaters hanging from a suspended ceiling under a retractable roof to warm the November air, and played out in front of the biggest crowd ever to watch a tennis match, 27,432, most of them French. Weird it sounds, weird it was.
That Tsonga subsequently dissolved under sustained pressure said as much about his own frailties as those to which Wawrinka succumbed in that potentially pivotal moment in the second set, but you could not fault either of them for commitment.
The fans, either waving Tricolors or clanking cow-bells (nothing like a stereotype to fan national fervour), ramped up the noise as Wawrinka regained his composure to win 6-1, 3-6, 6-3, 6-2 in two hours and 24 minutes. He hit an astonishing 61 winners.
Later, in French, he defined what it is to play in such a cauldron: “It’s a final. I’m representing my country. This is why I hate tennis and I love tennis. It’s because the emotions really hurt you when you’re nervous, but it’s so wonderful when you’re playing well.”
It is barely a week since Wawrinka shredded those emotions like confetti when he cracked in the semi-final of the ATP World Tour Finals against Federer, after the great man’s wife, Mirka, informed him from her husband’s box that he was showing lachrymose tendencies. So they say. Whether she did or not is not so important as the player’s belief that she said something derogatory. It took a frank chat afterwards for Wawrinka and Federer to put the blow-up in perspective ahead of this tie. All was forgotten here.
Federer tried heroically to manage the back injury that cut him down in London but could do little to stop the most mercurial player in tennis winning 6-1, 6-4, 6-3 in an hour and 46 minutes. There were glimpses of Federer’s gifts, and a lot of courage, but Monfils, who is 10-2 in Davis Cup singles now, had no mercy on the stricken Swiss.
Federer tried to allay fears he would miss the reverse singles on Sunday. “No negatives,” he said. “I started feeling better as the match went on. Right now, it feels somewhat all right. I will definitely make myself available if I feel I can play proper tennis, which I was able to do today. It was a proper match and he was the better player.”
