Novak Djokovic played the clay court match of his life but it wasn’t quit enough to beat Rafael Nadal.

Either Rafael Nadal fell out of the bed this morning or three straight clay titles have worn him down because he gave Novak Djokovic a break in his very first service game of their semifinal in Madrid by double faulting with a serve that landed halfway up the net then slowly rolled back towards him. As for the rest of his game, Rafa was spraying balls like a misbehaving ball machine.

When you see your opponent doing that, especially if he’s the best clay court player on the planet, you can’t help but feel very good all of a sudden. And Djokovic did feel good. He probably couldn’t believe his eyes. And he wasn’t just feeling good, he was carrying out a successful strategy.

Serving with a 4-2 lead in the first set, Djokovic was slamming balls at Rafa’s backhand till he got a good enough angle to hit a sharp crosscourt backhand to Rafa’s forehand side. He followed that up with another hard flat shot to Rafa’s backhand then hit behind him to finish off the point. In the next point he took a short ball and hit wide to Rafa’s forehand side again. Djokovic walked off the court having won the game as Rafa swisped at the clay with his racket.

I wondered if anyone would beat Rafa on clay this year and, if they did, would it be one of those matches where Rafa was exhausted or would his opponent be able to outplay him? Djokovic is the second best clay court player on the planet this year – he was Rafa’s victim in the final of the previous two Masters 1000 events in Monte Carlo and Rome – so he’s as good a candidate as anyone and he has something Roger Federer doesn’t: a good strong two handed backhand and a unparalleled ability to change directions with it.

Well, Djokovic is actually second when it comes to that too. David Nalbandian is best at redirecting his backhand but now he’s out for months with hip surgery and I’ve not seen anyone return from hip surgery yet and look good. Have you? To tell you how important that redirection thing is, Nalbandian actually has a winning record over Nadal.

Djokovic held on to the break to win the first set and Rafa began to wake up a bit in the second set, but after going up 2-1 he called for medical help. Rafa’s left knee was bothering him so maybe he hadn’t fallen out of bed and maybe this is the same thing we see each year with Rafa: the fatigue induced physical breakdown. He used to wear tape under both knees, now he had tape on top of his knee.

Rafa stayed in the second set but clearly he wasn’t at full strength so you had to think the knee was bothering him. He was still spraying shots and he wasn’t winning points when he had to run down a drop shot, clearly something wasn’t right. I want to say that Rafa also wasn’t running around his backhand as much as usual but it’s hard to know because Djokovic was hitting hard flat shots to his backhand side and maybe Rafa didn’t have time to run around his backhand. I’d have to see someone beat Rafa with the same tactic when he doesn’t have tape all over his knee to know for sure.

Djokovic got two break points at 4-4 and another at 5-5 but Rafa does what he does, hang in there, and he had a set point on Djokovic’s serve at 6-5. This is a good time to note one other place where Djokovic comes in second.

Rafa gets a lot of credit for adding more mad skills to his game than any other player and he deserves that crown as does his coach Toni Nadal since everyone else imports temporary coaches while Toni and Rafa appear to go it alone, but Djokovic comes in second again and that’s a good thing. His net game has improved tremendously and he used it to fend off that break point.

Thus they found themselves in the second set tiebreaker and I can assure you Djokovic did not want to go another round with Rafa, but Rafa found himself with a set point at 6-3 in the tiebreaker after some gorgeous play that included a runaround forehand down the line that was so improbable that it left Djokovic flat footed even though he was only a few feet from where it landed. Djokovic put a return out of the court and we were on to the third set.

Serving at 1-2 in the third set Rafa shanked a serve so badly it ended up in the bottom of the net. I guess it can happen to anyone but I’ve never seen it happen to him before. That double fault put him down 0-30 and Djokovic managed to get the break but in next game, Rafa put Djokovic through a 31 point rally before finishing it off with a feathery drop shot and Djokovic started to cramp. Rafa had his break back.

It may seem disingenuous because both players gave us a huge match today, but you have to rap both players on the noggin for cheating tennis by playing their home country events instead of taking a week off. Both play five tournaments in four weeks including three Masters events because Rafa insists on playing Barcelona and Djokovic just played the small event in Serbia.

And they now found themselves in what would be the longest best out of three Masters match in history. I guarantee you it wouldn’t have been historic if the chair umpire had enforced the 25 second time limit between points, by the way. If you think Nadal takes forever between points, Djokovic is right up there.

Rafa hit another error to go down a minibreak in the third set tiebreaker and Djokovic looked like he might pull out his first clay court victory over Rafa in nine tries, but then he gave the minibreak right back. Rafa hit another error to give Djokovic a match point at 6-5 and Djokovic did everything he possibly could to cash in. There was a hard low backhand that Rafa had to scoop out of the dirt, a forehand down the line that just stayed inside the line, and a high bouncer that anyone else would have just put back in the court. But Rafa, who isn’t just anyone, swung up at the ball with a forehand swipe and curled a winner into the deep corner of his opponent’s court.

Two points later Djokovic had his second match point and this time he did all the saving before Rafa finally managed to wrong foot him and put another curling forehand in that same deep corner. On Rafa’s first match point at 8-7, Djokovic went to the drop shot again to save it but he messed up a return on his third match point and now they were at 9-9.

The quality of the shots was stunning and Rafa had one more stunning shot: an out of position running forehand that Djokovic surely wasn’t expecting him to hit for a winner. One more deep shot down the line and Rafa had added another entry to his long list of “best ever” matches.

Djokovic couldn’t beat Rafa even though Rafa didn’t look like he was at full strength, but jeez, don’t tell Djokovic that because he’d played magnificent tennis running down ball after ball after ball for over four hours in front of a madly partisan crowd. He did say the following after the match: “I’m very disappointed that I can play this well and still not win a match,” and he’s now in the curious position – like the rest of the tour – of feeling like he’s getting closer to beating Rafa but just as far away.

Still, he should remember that Rafa dealt with that feeling for, what, 160 weeks. That’s how long he stayed at number two and look where he is now.

Andy Murray had a plan in Madrid today and Tommy Robredo played right into it.

Tommy Robredo mishit a backhand and sent the ball flying out of the court to let Andy Murray win a tough service game and get to 4-4 in the first set of their third round match in La Caja Magica (The Magic Box), the magnificent new stadium in Madrid that is the site of this week’s Masters 1000 event. Murray immediately took the remaining tennis ball out of his pocket and swiped at it as he let out the curse in the middle of the following sentence: “All you need to do is ****ing play every point like that.”

Murray may have been yelling at himself or he may have been playing with Robredo’s head because clearly the message was: “All I have to do is play safely and let my opponent make errors to win this match.” Murray is often criticized for not playing aggressively enough and today he was turning the criticism on its head by verbally embracing “a just keep the ball in the court” strategy.

Murray may have been mad that he squandered two break points in the previous game with a few careless errors, but he really was just keeping the ball in the court. At times he looked like he was out on the practice court carefully hitting crosscourt backhands and forehands.

In the next game, Murray’s strategy appeared to be working as Robredo hit three unforced errors and Murray found himself up two break points again. I didn’t doubt that Murray could improve his clay court results this year but I did wonder how he’d go about it. He’s had problem with his conditioning in the past and here he was, relying on that conditioning by playing “be the backboard” therefore guaranteeing long points. And he was playing defensively against a Spanish player on Spanish soil. Was this being smart and reading his opponent or just being arrogant?

The strategy didn’t work just yet. Robredo forced Murray into errors to save those two break points and though Murray got two more of them, Robredo kept enough balls in the court to hold serve. But on Robredo’s next service game at 5-5, here we were again: Robredo hit more errors and Murray was up two break points one more time. Robredo knew it too because there went his racket flying across the court.

It must be extremely annoying to see your opponent exert just enough energy to stay in the point and wait around until you make an error then fulfill his expectations by doing just that. Robredo is smart enough to know what Murray was doing but apparently he thought the only way to beat him was going for winners. That’s kind of curious because Robredo has won 21 games on clay this year while Murray has won only 5 and here was Robredo whacking away instead of throwing in some drop shots or changing up speeds or, I don’t know, keeping the ball in the court just enough to force Murray to try a different tactic.

I suppose it’s not arrogance if it’s true. Robredo hit another inside out forehand error to lose that break point and go down a break at 5-6. Murray then served out to take the first set 7-5. Murray got another break early in the second set and now he’d succeeded completely. He was totally in Robredo’s head and took the next step, which was tantamount to rubbing Robredo’s face into the dirt after knocking him down. Murray turned to aggressive attacking tennis. Robredo won the first game in the second set and that was it.

Do you think Murray is that sophisticated? Did he and his team read Robredo well enough to come up with the strategy of completely demoralizing him in the first set then going for the jugular in the second? Don’t think they’re that good though they are very good. Murray saw Robredo struggle and he managed to remind himself, with a bit of yelling, to let Robredo continue his self-destruction.

Murray overtook Novak Djokovic and is now the number three player on the planet. If Djokovic and Murray are the next version of Federer-Nadal, I’m still having trouble seeing Mr. Cat and Mouse taking many slams. But Murray has beaten Djokovic the last three times they’ve played so I’d better get used to it.

By the way, Andy Roddick got a wedding present from Nikolay Davydenko today: a walkover into the quarterfinals. And Ivan Ljubicic is still trucking along and finds himself in the quarterfinals, though he played in a weak quarter with an out of form Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Gilles Simon who is allergic to big events.

One more thing about The Magic Box. Its shaker and mover is one Ion Tiriac, former tennis player and manager – he was Ilie Nastase’s Svengali and Boris Becker‘s manager. Since then he has branched out. Two years ago he was worth more than $1 billion from a wide range of financial interests that include a bank appropriately named Banca Tiriac.

As you can see, Tiriac is not short on ego and he’s now making noises about elevating the Madrid event to the fifth slam. I’m sure the organizers of Indian Wells and Miami are rolling their eyes over that one. Those are both two weeks events – well, more like a week and a half but at least they’re longer than Madrid – and they both rank only behind the four slams in ticket sales.

Having said that, Tiriac is a very smart guy and clearly handles the financial world very well. Indian Wells, meanwhile, almost lost its event a few years ago and had to sell some land and call in financial help from former tennis players like Pete Sampras. Last year they lost their longtime sponsor Pacific Life and managed to sign up BNP Paribas to replace it.

The event in Miami is sponsored by Sony Ericsson and many tennis observers expect the company to drop their sponsorship when the contract runs out. Sony Ericsson is also the main sponsor for the WTA and it surely doesn’t help that their marketing ambassador Maria Sharapova hasn’t played their event for the past two years and has missed the last eight months of the WTA tour with a shoulder injury.

It’s very unlikely that we’ll get a fifth slam and surely not on clay, but if any tournament czar can pull it off, it’s Tiriac.

Should you send young children off to tennis academies or not?

I wanted to cover the Dinara Safina vs. Svetlana Kuznetsova final in Rome as Safina put Kuznetsova away 6-3, 6-2, to further cement her hold on the number one ranking (feel free to weigh in on the match by leaving a comment), but I got waylaid by a documentary that preceded the match on Tennis Channel.

The filmmaker is Karim Koulakssis and the documentary is titled Tie Break. If you didn’t already get the pun by looking at the title of this post, tie break here refers to the ties that bind – family ties that are broken or frayed when a child moves to a tennis academy at a young age to train for a professional tennis career.

The framework of the documentary – which covers young players at the Mouratoglou Tennis Academy in Paris – is Marcos Baghdatis’ fabulous trip through the 2006 Australian Open all the way to the final. Baghdatis left his family in Cyprus to train at the academy when he was 13 years old. His Australian Open run not only provides the framework for the documentary but also asks the central question: Was the Australian Open final emotionally satisfying enough to make up for losing those childhood years with his family?

Sometimes leaving a parent behind might not be such a bad idea. There’s one freaky place in the documentary where you do wonder about pushy sports parents. A young girl broke her ankle while she was playing around and her father – who is also her coach – castigates himself for letting her out of his sight long enough to do something as silly as fool around. He promises not to let her out of his sight again. Now that is scary. That is what people mean when they complain about parents who don’t let their children have a childhood.

A family from the U.S. sells their house and most of their belongings then packs up their three kids and moves to the academy after Baghdatis spots their 4 year old hitting balls at Indian Wells. You may have seen videos of Jan Silva on the internet. His father is pretty sure that Jan can win multiple slams and while this sounds like yet another pushy sports father, let’s look into this a bit deeper.

In recent years, there’s been a lot of research that has corrected our view of talent. I grew up with the idea that Mozart was a child genius who fell out of the womb writing operas. Not so. I first remember correcting this opinion when I read Anders Ericsson‘s work in the 1990’s. In short, precocious musicians, for instance, may be very talented but what sets them apart is the tremendous amount of dedicated practice they put in.

Then Tiger Woods came along and I realized how important a devoted family is to excellence. I was particularly interested in this subject because my father was a musical child genius – his first piece was performed by an orchestra when he was 11 years old – while I was raised in an adoptive family screeching out short violin pieces in the basement. My grandmother was a music teacher while my adoptive parents were blue collar workers who listened to Lawrence Welk now and then.

I would never have been a child musical genius in any case; the point is that talent is a less important part of the equation than we think and dedicated practice much more. And just as Tiger loved going out to the golf course, Jan Silva appears to love playing tennis.

So what are the pitfalls of sending children to academies to train? Was Baghdatis’ Australian Open final enough to make up for missing those years with his family? For his father Christos Baghdatis it was. This is what he says in the documentary:

I have been justified by this result. It gave me the justification for my decisions I took in the past for him to follow. It was a dream of mine but it was the future of him.

And:

To leave home, to leave Cyprus and to go to France, it was a one way road. Coming back means it’s a failure.

Baghdatis the player is not so sure. As he explains that he has adjusted to the time lost with his parents, the emotion showing on his face betrays him. When the interviewer asks him how he feels, he admits that he would have liked to stay with his parents.

Baghdatis is having a tough time on the tour. He’s been injured a lot and his motivation appears to ebb and wane depending on the event. He’s an emotional guy. Maybe it would be exactly the same story if he’d grown up in Paris and could have attended the academy without ever leaving his family. But judging by his father’s comments, he may not have had much choice.

Not every family can afford to pack up their life and move off to a tennis academy with their child. There are lots of promising tennis players in out of the way places who will have to spend significant parts of their childhood in foreign places. But it’s not clear to me that Marcos Baghdatis would not have been just as happy today without that Australian Open final.

Serena Williams called out Dinara Safina this week and that sent us looking for a few theories to explain what makes Serena a champion.

People were entranced by the Manny Pacquiao – Ricky Hatton heavyweight prizefight in Las Vegas last weekend, but tennis had its own version of a heavyweight bout when recent number one player Serena Williams called out current number one player Dinara Safina at the WTA event in Rome this week.

This is not new behavior from Serena because she’s well known for being dismissive of her competition, but this was an aggressive move with the clear message: if you haven’t won a slam, you’re not qualified to be number one.

What Serena said was this: “We all know who the real number one is. Quite frankly, I’m the best in the world.” Ouch! Safina had no trouble getting the message because this was her response: “She can say this because she won like many more Grand Slams than me.”

Yes, Serena does have slams, 10 of them, and I doubt it bothered Serena one bit that she ended up in the same position as Ricky Hatton – on her butt in the first round. She was taken out in Rome with a left from Swiss player Patty Schnyder.

That’s very disappointing because I’d loved to have seen Serena and Safina go at it, but it did get me to thinking: What makes Serena the champion she is? I don’t exactly know but I do have two theories on the matter courtesy of this week’s New Yorker magazine.

The first one has to do with mirror neurons and it comes courtesy of Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, a neurologist who is profiled by John Colapinto in the magazine. It turns out that if you open and close your hand, certain neurons in your brain will fire. That’s not surprising but this is: if you happen to be sitting next to a person and you see them open and closes their hand, those same neurons will fire in your brain even though it’s the other person doing the action.

You can see whey they might be called mirror neurons and Ramachandran theorizes that autistic people might be lacking in mirror neurons because they have trouble imitating others and empathizing. I’m not suggesting that Serena is autistic, far from it, she’s a very highly functioning and social person. But I was wondering if someone like Serena, who doesn’t seems as concerned about what her fellow competitors think of her as much as most of us are, might have fewer of those somewhat empathetic neurons.

The next theory comes to us from Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. In another article in the magazine titled How David Beats Goliath, Gladwell shows what happens to people who win ugly.

Gladwell describes a girl’s basketball team coached by someone who didn’t know much about basketball with players who didn’t have much in the way of basketball skills. The coach decided that the best way for the girls to win was to use a full court press for the entire game. In other words, harass and frustrate their opponents by closely guarding them every inch of the court instead of waiting until they’d thrown the ball in and advanced to the offensive basket.

The team won its games by large scores and reached the national playoffs but they pissed off a lot of opposing teams because they beat them badly. And since teams didn’t like getting beaten badly, they complained that this wasn’t how the game should be played, especially because, they said, girls should be learning basketball skills instead of running around like their hair is on fire.

When you defeat a traditional approach to the game with an unexpected strategy, you can expect backlash. The little team that could played the third round of the playoffs against a team that was playing on its home court and had supplied the referees for the game. These referees decided to negate the full court press by calling a ridiculously high number of touch fouls, thus forcing the team to abandon the full court press.

The point here is that outsiders sometimes win by taking a different, controversial approach and Serena has always been an outsider. Her father Richard Williams trained Serena and her sister Venus outside of the traditional junior tennis channels and he kept them out of junior tournaments. The sisters are also outsiders because they’re black and there were few black players on tour when they started. They were racially harassed in Indian Wells in 2001 after Venus pulled out of a Venus vs. Serena semifinal at the last minute.

That’s what you call backlash and though it was racially motivated, it was also a response to the Williams’ way of doing as they pleased regardless of what anyone else thinks. Venus isn’t far behind Serena with seven slams, but Serena has that extra bit of toughness and it goes back to something these two theories share: being a social outsider.

Venus doesn’t call out her opponents; she’s more sympathetic to her opponents’ feelings. Serena doesn’t care.

It’s hard to know whether Serena can return to number one and stay there because she has trouble playing week in and week out due to recurring injury problems. The WTA has has added more required events and heavy penalties for missing them. That will also make it harder on Serena.

Safina is starting to take on the leadership that comes with the number one ranking. She lambasted the Rome tournament organizers for threatening players’ careers by making them run around on wet clay (you can see why in the image above), and I expect she’ll get her slam. But right now, I have to say that I don’t disagree with Serena.

Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic met in the semifinals in Rome and I imagined what might have been going through Roger’s head.

If we were to treat today’s Rome semifinal between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer as a dramatic plot – and why not considering that each match and tournament, and any other form of sports competition for that matter, follows a complete dramatic arc in the short time it takes to go from start to end – the fourth game in the second set would be the turnaround, the point at which everything changes.

Roger had won the first set and he was now up a break at 3-1 in the second and he had a break point. We’re used to seeing Roger’s game improve with each round and this would have been the perfect time to lift his game just one more notch and put the second set away with a double break. He’d already hit a gorgeous backhand winner but when the break point came around, he chose that critical point to hit one of those limp backhands we complain about.

We always marveled at Roger’s slice backhand when he was using it to neutralize cannons from Andy Roddick and all the other big servers out there, but now we pull our hair out in exasperation as he keeps losing to Rafa the Exterminator without making adjustments. Why doesn’t he attack the serve from the backhand side?

Nole’s serve wasn’t that big but Roger sliced a return short and Nole promptly put it away. After Roger followed that up with two errors into the net, Nole had saved his serve. The errors kept coming from Roger with three in the next game and that gave Nole a break and put him back on serve. And it wasn’t as if Nole was pressing Roger, he was keeping the ball in play and letting Roger take himself out of the match.

This is a time when I’d like to have seen Roger crush a racket or do something more demonstrative than drop his head. As it was, Nole was the one who lifted his game and you could see it when he had a break point to go up 5-3. The two of them embarked on a 22 stroke rally that started with Roger running Nole all over the place, switched to Nole running Roger around, almost ended when Roger saved a ball that landed dead on the baseline and popped up at an awkward angle, and definitively ended with Roger mis-hitting yet another backhand.

I can only imagine what must be cross-eyed murky little characters with muddy boots running though Roger’s brain like Keystone Kops tripping all over each other and generally making a mess of things. I can also imagine Roger metaphorically swiping at them with his tennis racket trying to quiet the interior noise only to get distracted enough to mishit a backhand and find himself down 5-3 in a set which started with him up a break.

Roger will come away from this match telling himself that a semifinal loss in Rome is a great improvement over a third round loss in Monte Carlo and that he’s happy with his progress as he moves towards his goal of winning at Roland Garros, but this is the same way he lost to Nole in Miami and that will only feed those muddy little monsters. Roger managed to break Nole to get up 3-1 yet again in the third se, but Roger then lost his serve at love, throwing another mishit in there, and only won one more game the rest of the way.

I’d like to see Roger turn down the volume on the arrogance just the slightest bit and, assuming he has no physical problems that we’re not aware of, privately call up a mental coach or an actual tennis coach and pick their brain about the subject of focus. What once came naturally is now a struggle and it’s not as much about lifting his game as it is playing consistently. That skill has to be regained the way he learned it the first time: step by step.

For sure he’s not starting at the beginning and he could continue to play his way in semifinals and be happy, but if he wants that extra one or two slams, a remedial step might be necessary.