Instant replay has come to the US Open Series and last week in Los Angeles, Xavier Malisse embraced it. He used his first challenge in the fourth game of his first round match against Andre Agassi last week. Malisse had hit a backhand down the line that had been called out. Everyone in my section stood up, turned around and looked at the screen to see if the challenge would be upheld. It’s a cool thing, the challenge, because the crowd gets into it. Malisse won his challenge and broke Agassi in that game.

He gave the break right back in the next game but he had something better up his sleeve.

Agassi was up 6-4 in the first set tiebreaker, it was set point. He hit a hard forehand down the line and Malisse responded with a backhand that was called long. Agassi walked off the court, the set was over. Except that it wasn’t. Malisse challenged the call and won the challenge. What had been a 7-4 score was now 6-5. Agassi finally won the tiebreaker, 12-10, but not until (yuck) Malisse had had two set points of his own.

Malisse lost the second set 6-0. (check this). The moral of the story? [blockquote]You can win a challenge that saves a set but you can still lose your mind. I suppose Malisse’s meltdown came from the disappointment of having snatched a set point away from Agassi, getting two of his own set points, and still not being able to win the set.

And here is the problem with instant replay. It gives you a great deal of satisfaction if you win a challenge but it doesn’t pump you up anywhere near as much as arguing a line call. You can psyche yourself up and your opponent out by making a big deal out of line calls. John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors made an art out of it. Arguing about a line call was the prime method of unnerving an opponent who had somehow managed to snatch the momentum of the match. First of all you can delay the game to stall your opponent’s momentum. And if you’re very good, you can piss them off and take them out of their game. [blockquote]You don’t think McEnroe or Connors really thought those balls were out, do you?

Not that instant replay stops everyone from arguing. Marat Safin hit a ball that was called good in his (first round?) match with Mardy Fish in Los Angeles. Fish challenged the call but the replay screen wasn’t working. The Hawkeye booth confirmed that the original call was correct and Fish lost his challenge [include image of Fish arguing here] but Fish wasn’t having it. If he couldn’t see it, it didn’t happen. (who won the match? If Fish was losing, maybe he was trying to psyche himself up).

Some people weren’t argumentative enough. Fernando Gonzalez and Andre Agassi were on serve at 3-2 in the second set of their third round match in Los Angeles (fix this because everything but Goldstein is in LA). Gonzalez was up 40-0 when he hit a forehand that was called out but it clearly landed on the line. If he’d challenged it, he could have won the game. But he didn’t and he ended up getting broken. He won the match but it took him three sets to do it. It was 110 degrees on the court, he might have saved the second set and a lot of his energy if he’d used that challenge. The next day(?) he lost to Dmitri Tursunov(?). Maybe he was tired, who knows.

So here are the two aspects of instant replay that need attention. One: who is allowed to say whether it’s out or not? Can the coach signal it? Can the players ask the umpire his opinion? Two: if the chair umpire knows that Hawk Eye messed up – the image is rotated for instance – they should then be able to make take that into consideration and make the correct call.

Edit this with Terry and submit to Tennis.com?
Just because you win a challenge doesn’t mean you can’t throw a tantrum. In the doubles finals at Indianapolis two weeks ago, Paul Goldstein and Jim Thomas challenged a call out in their doubles final against Andy Roddick and Bobby Reynolds. They won the challenge but Goldstein was not at all happy because the chair umpire ruled that the point should be replayed because the linesperson made the call early preventing the opposing player from playing the ball. Goldstein was irate because the ball was clearly out of reach. He chopped the net with his racket and kicked the base of the umpire’s chair. If it had been Xavier Malisse or Marat Safin, the chair umpire would have docked them a point for chair umpire abuse. Goldstein’s such a nice guy that he got away with it.

Does instant replay take the tension out of the game? Would we prefer to see Jimmy Connors yell and scream. It does affects players psyche. Then, with online coaching, is more tension gone or added? First we take away an opportunity to be irate and get yourself going then we bring down a coach so you are less likely to throw away a second set at 6-0 because you wer…

We’re slowly draining tension out of the game. What will players do to regain it. Take baiting(?) lessons from Marco Materazzi… You do realize that we could be encouraging much worse behavior by taking away arguing over a line call. Players might have to resort to harrassment or inciting fans to throw … I hesitate to mention this because it’s disgusting but soccer fans evidently pee into empty beer cups (the men presumably though I did once ride the Green Tortoise[link?] – a hippie bus – from Boston to New Orleans for Mardi Gras and used a funnel at the front of the bus for emergency peeing) and throw piss bombs on opposing players as they run into their locker room.

Don’t worry though, because Hawkeye doesn’t always work.

In the first set of the Bryan brothers semifinal match, they challenged a call and it took so long to come up on the screen that they said, forget about it, we’ll just move on. And they did.

During a quarterfinal match between Robbie Ginepri and Dominik Hrbaty, Hrbaty had a fault called on him and he challenged it. The replay verified that the ball was good, it was not a fault. But Ginepri complained because the image on the screen was flipped 180 degrees. That made the ball look like it was good even though it was actually out if the image had been oriented correctly. Unbelievably, the umpire upheld Hrbaty. Ginepri was not amused. He got to the tiebreaker in the set but lost it badly (7-0?) and never recovered. I guess arguing has its limits. [do I have an image of Ginepri arguing?]

This week’s instant replay stats as of 5-4 in the first set of the final (check my record of the match to see if there were challenges in the rest of the match). 70 challenges, 32 overturned calls, 45% overturn rate.

During the week in Los Angeles, players won challenges about 45% of the time so they were right almost half the time. Next week in Los Angeles players were winning only 33% of their challenges by the time the semifinal rolled around. Not that it stopped Marat Safin or Arnaud Clement from challenging calls. They both challenged calls in the first set and won on balls that barely grazed the baseline.

That must have emboldened Safin and Clement because they got into the habit of holding long investigations aftern any call that was questionable. After Safin walked up and aligned himself along the service line to decide whether to challenge a Clement serve that was called good, the chair umpire, Jake Garner, who looked like he could still have been in his teens, warned Safin about delaying the match.

Safin was pissed off. Never one to miss anything, he asked the young-looking man how many matches he’d umpired. Garner refused to take the bait but a little while later Safin complained to an ATP official sitting alongside the court. Safin reasoned that he had 30 seconds to make his challenge since players are given 30 seconds between points but Darby said the umpire was correct, you are supposed to make challenge immediately.

Serving with ad point at 5-6, Safin was successful on another amazingly close challenge when his serve was called out. That didn’t stop Clement from arguing that the ball mark showed the ball out. Evidently he didn’t realize that you can challenge a challenge. The point was replayed but, incredibly enough, Safin’s next serve was called out too and he won his third challenge of the day. This was the closest call of all and it got him into the first set tiebreaker. Safin lost.

In Toronto, Rafael Nadal hit a wicked inside out forehand in the first game of his match with Tomas Berdych. The ball was called out but it actually landed inside the baseline. Nadal didn’t challenge it. That wasn’t the reason, of course, be he lost the match. Later that day, Dmitri Tursunov was angry about a challenge he lost in a loss to Roger Federer. He insisted that Federer’s ball was out no matter what Hawkeye said because the ball mark was outside the line.

Maybe there is an exception to the rule that you cannot coach from the sidelines. After Andy Murray challenged a call in the second set, Brad Gilbert yelled “No!” from the stands. The next time Murray considered challenging a call, he looked up at Gilbert for advice. Gilbert pointed his finger up to indicate that the ball was out and Murray should not challenge the call. Is this exception in the ATP rulebook I wonder?

Gilbert did it again in Murray’s improbably victory over Federer. He put his hand down to indicate that a ball was good and should be challenged by Murray but the ball was out. Federer has already complained about Rafael Nadal’s coach, his Uncle Toni, coaching from the sidelines. [look at asapsports transcript, did Fed say anything about it.] He was probably too unhappy about the end of his [??] winning streak on hard court but I would hope someone challenges Gilbert.

Let’s check in on the women. This goes under the same category as the Paul Goldstein thing. Instant replay doesn’t solve every problem, thankfully for those players who like to argue which includes most players. Elena Dementieva was facing break point in her semifinal match against Maria Sharapova at the JP Morgan Chase open when Sharapova hit a forehand down the line that was called out. Sharapova challenged to call and walked off the court.

This is a new way to show up your opponent. Walk off the court under the assumption that you could not possibly be wrong. It wasn’t quite over, though. The chair umpire wanted to have the point replayed but appeared to change her mind after a discussion with Sharapova. Now Dementieva was pissed off and some fans were booing. A WTA official came out and cleared the matter up and the Sharapova kept her challenge and won the game.

The coach is not supposed the coach the player but how about the chair umpire. Roddick was up a break on Andy Murray at Cincinnati when one of his shots was called wide. The linesman hesitated for a microsecond so Roddick considered challenging the call. But Murray signaled that it was out then the chair umpire, Carlos Bernardes(sp?), smiled and said, “Don’t do it, don’t do it.” Roddick, of course, challenged. Hawk Eye(is there a hyphen?) showed that it was clearly out. Murray might have been bamboozling Roddick but why would the chair umpire steer him wrong?

Francesco Schiavone against Lindsay Davenport in the second(?) round of the Penn Pilot tournament. She wanted to remind the chair umpire that just because there is instant replay doesn’t mean that they can’t overrule. This does bring up the issue – has anyone looked at whether the number of overrules is now reduced because chair umpires know that players can challenge the call? Also, it’s bad enough when a linesperson gets a call wrong but if a chair umpire overrules a call then the players challenges that, it looks even worse. I imagine it does effect the chair umpires actions this way (yuck).

There is one elephant in the closet (is there such a term) remaining: is Hawk Eye 100% correct. Well, we know it’s not 100% correct, the USTA came up with a (what was the %?). You saw it when players pointed to a ball mark that clearly showed the ball out. [blockquote]Hawk Eye is not always correct but we are much more comfortable with a digital error than human error because it has a quantifiable cause, maybe the humidity affected the hard disks in the computer or a ufo passed by quickly and interfered with the wireless signals …. whatever the reason, it’s not personal, it’s not like the lineperson making a home call in the Davis Cup finals.