I told you there was a problem with Pörtschach. Because both qualifying ended and the main draw started on Sunday, we had to pick our ATP fantasy team before Sunday morning at 10am. That’s why I didn’t know that Richard Gasquet got in as a lucky loser. He beat Hrbaty in the first round. I admit that I looked at the qualifers’ draw and did not see his name. Selective blindness. I expect to see young unknowns there, not players who’ve beaten Federer.

Not only that but no one in the ATP fantasy league chose a doubles team because none of our choices are playing in Pörtschach. I guess they’re in Dusseldorf too.

There were sixteen matches in the first round at Pörtschach. In ten of those matches the opponents had never played each other

I knew it could happen but I didn’t think it would: Hewitt lost in the first round. He is really lost these days. He also twisted his ankle in the match. He’s had so many injuries you begin to wonder if he wouldn’t prefer to be home with his family and buddies. It’s unfortunate for Pörtschach too, Hewitt flashing the vicht is the p.r. image for the tournament. Their main draw is gone in the first round and all the big players are at the World Team Cup event.

The ATP isn’t helping. It started the week with a splash page on its website advertising the World Team Cup. Do I really need to load yet another page before I can get to the where I want to go? Pörtschach’s didn’t help themselves either. Their website was not working on Sunday and Monday.

Usually I pick about 50% of my first round matches correctly. That is as accurate as tossing a coin. This week my record was 10/16 in the first round which is unusually high. Here is one reason it’s difficult to predict first round matches.

There were sixteen matches in the first round at Pörtschach. In ten of those matches the opponents had never played each other. The hardest thing to do in an early round is to adjust to a new opponent. Your coach can scout the player but that doesn’t give you a feel for the spin of their ball or the rhythm of their shots and, often, by the time you adjust, that’s it, the match is over.

The higher ranked player has an advantage in most matches but that advantage is reduced against a new player. In Major League Baseball, there are plenty of cases where a rookie pitcher was successful the first time he went around the league. By the time players saw him a second time, they knew what to expect and the pitcher was less successful.

Because the French Open starts on Sunday, the Pörtschach semifinals are on Friday and the final on Saturday. I expected to check in after round two but the SBC DSL network was down for an evening and then I lost my TCP/IP stack. I don’t know what that is but my DSL modem won’t work without it. Meanwhile, I received two frozen chickens by UPS and had no idea how to cut them up and when I logged onto google to ask, the internet was down again.

The first tech support person I had spoken to, “Jim”, speaking from somewhere in India – why do they insult our intelligence by using fake Western names? – had told me to push the reset button on my modem and that had wiped out my login info. “Happy,” somewhere in the US, helped me fix it. Which was a good thing because the frozen chickens had been shipped with twenty pounds of beef soup bones and there was blood all over the kitchen. I had already stabbed myself in the thumb trying to cut through the chicken backbone and I had dried red blood on my watch. I was hoping my vegetarian roommate did not walk in on this scene.

Had I checked in, this is what I would have found. Davydenko is chugging along towards the final and will probably win it, he won last year. Jiri Novak, who has done nothing lately, is in the semifinals after getting rid of both Melzer and Chela. Andrei Pavel is the other surprise. He beat Simon to get to the semis.

I picked Luis Horna for my team because I thought he might finally have recovered from his win in Acapulco. I was right, he’s in the semis too. I have him in the final only because I need the prize money. Maybe Horna read my column and figured out what he was doing wrong. Could happen.

One last interesting thing to look at. After Tommy Robredo won Hamburg last week, he addressed the media about his search for a coach. Look at this comment:

For example last week against (Greg) Rusedski, if I had been with coach, I wouldn’t have lost for sure. Because in the game I was completely lost. I was trying to look outside, and my physio was there and he was supporting me, but he wasn’t able to tell me exactly what to do. So I need to find someone in the future.

Now, he could have been saying that a coach would have told him how to prepare for Rusedski, but it sounds like he’s also expects his coach to pass him information during the match. I bring this up because Roger Federer had words with Rafael Nadal’s coach, uncle Toni Nadal, during the Rome final because Toni was coaching during the match. Federer yelled at him sarcastically ”Is that all right Toni?” and later said, ”I caught him in the act and it’s not the first time.”

Many people are so enamored of Federer that they wonder if Federer held back some of his game in Rome so as to prevent giving away all of his strategy for the French Open. That is highly wishful thinking but I do think Federer was doing the same thing Phil Jackson does before his Los Angeles Lakers team plays a big game. He calls out the officials to make sure that he gets good calls.

That is what Federer is doing. He wants to make sure that officials don’t allow Toni to coach if they meet in the French Open final. Smart man.