Paris Rain Fails to Save Trio of Big Names

If the weather carries on as it has been, the organizers of the French Open might like to consider adapting cricket's Duckworth/Lewis method. This is a system whereby matches interrupted by rain can be decided over a shortened distance. The great thing about it is that no one really understands it and so is in no position to argue with it.

Tennis has done it before, of course, when it introduced the tie-breaker to stop matches going on interminably. This, in contrast to Duckworth/Lewis, is quite a straightforward system.

Before the rain arrived today - making it four days out of five that the weather has intervened - the first real upsets of the competition took place with the defeats of Amelie Mauresmo, two times a grand-slam winner, and the men's sixth and seventh seeds, David Nalbandian and James Blake. And what was really surprising was that all three lost to no-hopers.

Even Mauresmo, who has a reputation for being someone who could choke on pureed banana, could not possibly lose to the Spanish qualifier Carla Suarez Navarro. But this is what she did, going out 6-3, 6-4.

In fairness to Mauresmo, who in 2006 won the Australian and Wimbledon titles, this is her first tournament since last month's Fed Cup tie in Japan. Since then she has been held back by an abdominal injury and today she clearly had trouble with her serve as she lost her second-round match in 72 minutes.

Suarez Navarro, 19, who was playing in her first grand-slam event, was the first to hold serve in the fifth game and broke her opponent again to lead 5-2 before sealing the opening set in 34 minutes. Mauresmo, who has never made it past the quarter-finals in Paris, dropped serve again in the fourth game of the second set and despite managing three games in a row, was broken again in the ninth.

"Frankly, I don't know what to say right now, because there was nothing much on my side, apart from a few games in which I was slightly more aggressive and not letting her play that game that much," Mauresmo said. "I don't know if I let her impose her style too much, because she has a typically Spanish style. It's usually men playing like that, so she has a very long shot, but her balls were not that fast."

Nalbandian, whose forebears are from Armenia, where his name means blacksmith, played with very little iron in his soul after winning the first two sets against Jeremy Chardy of France, who had not appeared on the main men's tour in 2008 before this week and made it into the draw only after being handed a wild card. Chardy, the 2005 Wimbledon boys' champion, won 3-6, 4-6, 6-2, 6-1, 6-2. Nalbandian, the Wimbledon runner-up in 2002, was routed in the final three sets by Chardy, 21, who recovered from 2-0 down in the fifth to win on his second match-point.

Just when things seemed to be going rather well for the Americans after all their men lost in the first round of the singles in 2007, James Blake, the seventh seed, joined Nalbandian with unexpected time on his hands.

Latvian teenager Ernests Gulbis upset Blake 7-6, 3-6, 7-5, 6-3. "I lost to a guy ranked 80th in the world. Granted, he didn't play like 80th in the world, he played better than that," Blake said. "But there are a lot of guys out there that can dictate play against me if I try to play like that."

Erratic Venus still searching for solution to clay

Eleven o'clock on a grey morning in northern Europe is no time or place for a California girl to play tennis - and at times, especially early on, Venus Williams looked as though she would have preferred to be anywhere but Court Philippe-Chatrier at Roland Garros.

But as milky sunshine broke through, the No8 seed, who is making her 12th attempt to win the clay-court game's crown of crowns, warmed to what was not the most exacting of tasks, subduing Selima Sfar, a qualifier from that tennis mini-power, Tunisia. Her 6-2, 6-4 victory in 92 minutes confirmed her place in the third round.

If everything works out as the seedings predict, Williams will make it to the quarter-finals where she will meet Jelena Jankovic, the third-seeded Serb who came through an injury scare to beat Marina Erakovic today. The semi-finals are where the Williams sisters will meet if they manage to upset the seedings - Serena is No5 - and where Venus will have the chance to avenge her defeat in the 2002 Paris final. But that's looking ahead a little too far, particularly in view of Venus' erratic form against Sfar.

Invited to mark her performance out of 10, Williams said it was not something she ever did. "There have been times when I've played terrible and won and there've been times when I played good and didn't win. It's really just about living in that moment on the court, so that's what I did."

To an extent, Venus deserves great credit for achieving anything at all on clay, so contrary are its demands to the sort of game she plays. She is far too restless, wanting to get things done quickly when patience is a quality that the surface requires above most others. Where a clay-courter will spend his or her day moving from side to side, endlessly retrieving, Williams cannot resist going back and forth - mostly forth - in search of a winning volley. If only the damned surface would sprout a little grass, she must be thinking.

She agreed that, even by her standards, she spent a great deal of time in the proximity of the net in this match. "I like it up there," she said, "so I do try to get there when I can." And then, as an afterthought: "It's just finally kicked in. I should always have been there years ago."

Sfar, 30, who left Tunisia when she was 13 to train with Nathalie Tauziat in Biarritz, France, is a clay-courter with a game that is sound rather than spectacular. This was her third French Open, but her first since 2002. In each of the next five years she failed to make it through qualifying.

The punchiest part of Sfar's game is her serve, which regularly exceeds 170kph. After that she relies mostly on court craft and pleasant, rather than devastating, ground strokes. Her single-handed backhand is a bit like Justine Henin's, but no more than a bit. She can be unexpectedly creative, as she was when she tried a drop-shot return off a spanking Williams serve.

Sfar's one passage of real ascendancy came in the third game when she broke Williams to love, although in truth this had more to do with the American's ground strokes misfiring than Sfar being the better player. At 30-all in the next game, Sfar was two points from a 3-1 lead but Williams' pugnacious response to this slightly awkward situation restored the expected order. Typical, though, of Williams' patchy form was her start to the seventh game, a pumped-up ace followed by the limpest of double faults.

Williams lapsed in the middle of the second set when she dropped serve to trail 3-2; and having opened a 40-love lead in the next game she was pegged back to deuce and then needed a lucky reflex volley to save a point that would have put her 4-2 behind.

That was the end of the excitement and the match ended in a manner that was not wholly representative of what had gone before when Williams clumped the cleanest of forehand winners down the line.

For Sfar, the match was a happy experience despite the outcome. "I'm usually rather bad tempered when I lose," she said. "But, you know, this time it was special. I could not not have smiled. I was on Court Philippe-Chatrier. It was packed full. The audience was really nice to me. I was playing Venus Williams and I did my best. Tactically speaking, I think I played 70% of my maximum. In the second set I should have dared a bit more, gone forward a bit more. But it was really a lot of pleasure. If I had to do it again I would have done it immediately."