A few more thoughts about Roger Federer’s first round loss to Andy Murray at Dubai and a look at Andy Roddick’s first trip to the very same locale.

I just bought a laptop so I could watch streaming video of tennis matches around the world. After all, it won’t be long before our laptops are our televisions. Already I can buy a gold-brick sized Slingbox to wirelessly funnel my television feed to my laptop whether I’m sitting at home in my pajamas (or less) or sitting on the veranda at the Four Seasons Hotel in Istanbul (anyone been there by the way? If so, please report in.)

After I flipped open the laptop, the first thing I tuned in were camel races in Dubai. Wow, those riders look tiny perched on the back of those camels, you can barely see them. I had a small fright as I wondered whether I was watching the child camel jockeys that were used for centuries before countries recently began to outlaw the practice.

No, it was weirder than that: the camels were controlled by robotic jockeys. Can you believe it? Wow, after centuries of using child slave labor, camel racers have skipped straight to robots in a matter of a few years thereby totally avoiding the tiresome need to pay for human labor. I’ve seldom seen such a huge cultural leap due to technology in such a short time.

The robots were developed by a Swiss company called K-Team. No word on whether they took part in the development of Roger Federer’s Wilson [K]-rackets and, please, no jokes about Fed’s robotic on court personality, o.k.?

Besides, we’ve recently established that Fed is unraveling a bit and I’d like to say a bit more about his loss to Andy Murray in the first round at Dubai earlier this week. My co-writer Pat Davis has become a real digger – a term originally applied to DJs who dig around in old record stores looking for quirky music samples. Pat uncovered this training blog of Fed’s activities.

Fed imported young U.S. player Michael McClune to hit with him in Dubai for ten days in February. McClune’s coach, Nick Fustar, chronicled the training sessions and the record shows that Federer is in fine fettle. He worked his way through intense two and half hour hitting sessions without appreciably raising his heart rate according to Fustar.

If Fed’s not suffering from physical problems, the mental wear of being ranked number one for four consecutive years may be getting to him. In the past, Fed could lift his game to another level when he needed it and now he can’t. He’s riding a one speed balloon tire bicycle instead of the ten speed he used to sport.

Does Fed need a coach? From the heartbroken way he described his breakup with previous coach Tony Roche, the company of a new sidekick might lift him mentally. It looks like he might need a boost to get him through the next phase of his career. At the rate he’s going this year, we could see him grinding out his last few slams which should make him think twice the next time he dismisses someone like Murray by calling him a grinder.

It’s too bad Mats Wilander questioned Fed’s manhood after Fed’s loss to Rafael Nadal in the 2006 French Open final because Wilander looks like he’s positioning himself to be the next uber-coach. Wilander was sitting in the stands during the match between Paul-Henri Mathieu and Andy Roddick in Dubai because he’s coaching Mathieu.

Mathieu is another of those players who was supposed to be the savior of French tennis. It makes me worry about his fellow countryman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Jo-Willy smashed his way onto the scene with a transcendent run to the Australian final and there are now huge expectations for him and he hasn’t even won a tournament yet. It also makes me appreciate cranky Murray just that much more. Murray is the only hope in the U.K. – they don’t have a Mathieu, Richard Gasquet, and a Tsonga – and yet Murray’s pulling if off and he’s doing it at 20 years old by throwing off the British tennis association’s plans for him and choosing his own crew. I believe, for instance, that Wilander is under contract to the French tennis association. Does anyone know for sure?

A graphic on the pixellated screen showed that Roddick has about 1.7 sec to get his racket on his opponent’s return of serve when he hits one of his humongous serves. That’s less time than counting out “one elephant two elephant…” This came up in John Isner’s match yesterday in Las Vegas because Isner hit a 148mph (238kph) serve. That kind of speed makes it hard to serve and volley because the ball gets to the opponent so quickly the server doesn’t have time to get to the net.

The big servers are usually the bigger, taller guys and they’re not the best movers so it’s harder for them to pick up a well-struck return. That puts all the more pressure on them to serve big and further limits their game. Of course, you don’t expect your opponent to return a huge serve but the top players can return anything just below the upper limits of servedom and that explains, in a nutshell, Fed’s dominance over Roddick.

On this day, though, our much maligned Mr. Roddick was getting in his quota of big serves and he kept the ball in play long enough for Mathieu to make errors. Roddick played an excellent match and won it in straight sets, 6-3, 6-4. Next up for Roddick is Rafael Nadal. If Roddick can play even better from the baseline and throw in a few more aces, he has a chance to beat Mr. Nadal too.