Svetlana Kuznetsova beat Dinara Safina, 6-4, 6-2, to win the French Open title in Paris today in a see saw battle of nerves.

Dinara Safina has a problem. She’s been in three of the last slam finals and each time she’s underperformed. And with each final the pressure rises.

There was pressure to win her first slam in the 2008 French Open final against Ana Ivanovic. Then there was pressure to win her second slam final at the 2009 Australian Open against Serena William. And today there was pressure to wipe out her miserable performance in the Australian final AND prove that she deserved her number one ranking in the French Open final against Svetlana Kuznetsova

That miserable performance gave Serena her 10th slam title and Serena has been doing her best to drag Safina into a psychological battle for the number one ranking. Serena always punks her vanquishers when she loses and she did it again this week after losing to Kuznetsova in the quarterfinals: “Honestly I think I lost because of me and not because of anything she did.”

Serena also punked Safina in Rome last month: “We all know who the real No. 1 is. Quite frankly, I’m the best in the world.” The pressure keeps rising and each time it takes away part of Safina’s game. Today it was her serve. She double faulted seven times and lost match point on a double fault. And though Kuzy vanquished a few of her own demons today by playing just aggressively enough to win – until winning Stuttgart last month she’d lost six straight finals dating back to August 2007 including a U.S. Open final – Safina helped her and I don’t think she was pulling a Serena during this exchange after the match:

Q. Is there any comfort to you that she played a very good match. It wasn’t like she put you in a position to win but you didn’t win. Does that make it any easier for you, or…

DINARA SAFINA: I lost myself.

If that’s a lost in translation moment it describes Safina’s state of mind. In the first set she had the competitive glare going but it was less a matter of sticking her jaw out than it was trepidation and fear of losing fighting it out with justified feelings of domination (she’d won 20 or her last 21 matches).

This was less a slam final than a battle of nerves starting off with both players losing their serve. After that they settled down and we got some good tennis, but when Safina served at 3-4 in the first set her serve started deserting her. She lost that game and then it was time for Kuzy to wig out and lose her serve. But Safina’s serve deserted her again in the next game and that gave Kuzy the first set.

Kuzy broke to go up 4-2 in the second set and Safina’s dominance finally caved in to the trepidation and fear of losing. After a bad shot in the next game, Kuzy had a chance to return the favor but she kept her cool with what the British call keepy uppy and surfer slackers might call hacky sack – a little footy with the tennis ball in other words – and that was the difference. Kuzy found a way to hold on to herself while Safina could not.

What can Safina do now? Well she can start with faith and faith depends on memory, particularly for an athlete. There’s the memory of the goal you are moving towards and the memory of what you’ve been able to achieve in the past and the two of them work together to propel you forward. Safina can remember that a short while ago she was in the habit of giving in to self-doubt in the form of berating herself when things didn’t go well on court. She’s learned how to change that well enough to reach the number one ranking in the world and that should give her faith.

If Safina can change that, she can also learn to handle nerves. She could also look across the net at Kuzy and remember that it was five years between slams for her with a lot of tough questions in between. Kuzy is as earnest as any athlete out there in facing the music with the media after a tough loss and she’s had plenty of them. And now she’s the only multi-slam winner among the vaunted Russian women who were raised in their home country.

If all else fails, maybe Kuzy could teach Safina some keepy uppy.

Samantha Stosur ran all the way to the French Open semifinals before finally falling to Svetlana Kuznetsova so now I guess I’d better start finding out who she is.

Samantha Stosur

Of course I know the name Samantha Stosur. She’s a great doubles player with 22 doubles titles – including two slams – and was once ranked number one in doubles. And I vaguely associate her with Alicia Molik, another very good Aussie player whose career was dismantled in some way or another by illness and/or injury.

In Sam Stosur’s case the illness was Lyme Disease, a potentially dangerous illness which is contracted from tick bites. Stosur got up to number 27 in singles before getting ill in 2007 and missed almost a year. She’s what I’d call an average player in singles mainly because of her size. She’s a tick under 5ft8in (173cm) and weighs in at 143lbs (65kg). Svetlana Kuznetsova doesn’t have the skinny tall build of many of the Eastern Europeans – she’s only slightly taller than Stosur – but she’s got a good 15 more pounds (7kg) of power and that’s what sunk Stosur in today’s semifinal.

Admittedly I’m not a big follower of the women’s game but you can’t exactly blame me for not knowing much about Stosur. This is the first time she’s been past the fourth round at a slam in singles and her career record on clay is barely above .500. And she has no singles titles.

Stosur seemed to be thinking the same thing because she looked a bit spooked in the first set. She’s got an excellent service motion but she wasn’t going for first serves until she was already down a set and even then she got down 4-1 in the second set tiebreaker before uncorking a hammer of an inside out forehand and coming back to win the tiebreaker 7-5.

Kuzy countered by taking a protracted bathroom break after the second set and then, possibly concerned about a blister on her foot and a slight ankle sprain from her quarterfinal win over Serena Williams, she started playing more aggressively to end points and get her butt off the court as soon as possible. Of course that means more errors and Stosur got a break point at 2-2 in the third set. But Stosur missed two straight returns and, in the next game, made two more consecutive errors to go down a break.

Kuzy held on to her nerve and found her way in to the final against Dinara Safina. Commentator Martina Navratilova, see below, thinks that Stosur has enough stuff to win a slam some day. She’ll be up to a career high ranking of 18 after today and she got some guns on those arms of hers, but I think a lot of the top players can overpower her and it would be unusual to see someone make their way into the top ten all of a sudden in her mid-twenties.

If Stosur does something special at Wimbledon, a surface her game is better suited to, then likely I’m wrong.

Martina Navratilova

Martina, bless her heart, is in trouble again. She’s always been outspoken and thankfully that hasn’t changed. At the Paris ceremony to receive the Philippe Chatrier award from the International Tennis Federation this week, Martina offered ten changes to improve today’s game.

Some ITF people thought Martina should have chosen a different platform to express her views – especially as the ceremony took place in the middle of the French Open and the award is named after a former French tennis player and journalist who was president of the ITF for 20 years.

But what better platform could there be? See what she had to say below courtesy of Bob Larson’s Tennis News and tell me what you think. I disagree with the standardized tennis balls and hard courts – they add a diversity that’s unique to tennis, excessive ball bouncing – it’s taken care of by the time clock rule, and false tosses – a bit too fascistic for me, but otherwise I’m with her 100%. Six out of ten ain’t bad.

1. NO LETS “We need to speed up the game and this would certainly help. If the ball hits the top of the net on a serve, so be it. There’s no need to stop the point. Let’s keep going and maybe we could call this the Patrick Rafter Rule because he argued against it so much a few years ago.”
2. NO MORE THAN FIVE BOUNCES OF THE BALL BEFORE SERVE “Again this would speed the game up and there really is no need to spend so much time preparing. Without a doubt we could call this the Novak Djokovic Rule.”
3. NO MORE FALSE TOSSES “Same sort of thing but if a server gets things wrong that’s his or her fault and should not delay the game.”
4. GRUNTING NEEDS TO COME TO AN END “It’s annoying. It can be a hindrance. It is completely unnecessary. This is one piece of legislation I would really like to see enforced for the good of the game. You don’t hear Roger Federer making a wail or a shriek every time he hits the ball.”
5. FASTER COURTS “This would most certainly encourage players to come to the net a lot more and make the sport more varied again. Too many players play exactly the same way nowadays.”
6. SMALLER RACKETS “Technology now means the best way to play is simply sit on the baseline and hit big groundstrokes. I’m not advocating a return to wood but just making the head size smaller would put more importance on true skill.”
7. A TIME CLOCK RULE “How many players nowadays pay heed to the rightful time they should spend between points and how many officials honestly enforce it in the way it should? Team Tennis has proved having a clock on court would also involve the spectators and make it impossible to digress.”
8. STANDARDISING TENNIS BALLS “Too many injuries are caused and consequently too many leading players get injured and therefore miss important tournaments because balls vary so much from week to week. Having one uniform ball would help resolve this issue.”
9. STANDARDISING HARD COURT SURFACES “Of course this does not apply to clay or grass but so many hard courts are so different. So are really hard, some are much softer and once again this variation makes players much more likely to sustain injury.”
10. WHY IMPOSE RULES ON THE SIZES OF LOGOS AND PATCHES? “Golf has flown way in front of tennis when it comes to endorsements and sponsorship. There is no need to hit the manufacturers and potential backers when they want to put money into the game.”

Robin Soderling smothered Rafael Nadal in the fourth round at the French Open and sent him home early for the first time in four years.

Pete Sampras might have swallowed just a little bit after he woke up this morning and checked the scores at Roland Garros. The King is dead. After four straight French Open titles, Rafael Nadal finally played a bad game and opened the door for Roger Federer to equal Sampras’ record of 14 slams. Four years and 31 straight victories on the beautiful terre battue and Rafa finally played a subpar game on a day when his opponent played out of his mind.

Not only would Roger match Sampras’ record if he cashed in Rafa’s gift by winning the title in Paris, but he’d pass Sampras in most people’s minds because he’d have a career slam while Sampras only ever managed to reach one semifinal in Paris. My mind immediately went into nerd mode.

What if Roger won this thing and then got another U.S. Open to get his 15th slam? No one is going to edge Rod Laver out of the conversation with his two calendar slams – unless Rafa got one before he was done and became 1a next to Laver because only one of Laver’s calendar slams was in the Open Era. Would we hold Roger’s abysmal losing record to Rafa against him and give him a “greatest of all time” with an asterisk? Ah well, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Six times in his post match media session, Rafa said he’d left he ball short and that’s why he’d lost his first match ever at Roland Garros by going down to Robin Soderling, 6‑2, 6‑7(2), 6‑4, 7‑6(2). Rafa didn’t rise to the occasion and he didn’t fight tooth and nail in his usual rock steady style. And the ball wasn’t just short, a lot of the time it didn’t even reach the net.

It probably looks like Soderling is one of the least likely candidates to end such a stupendous winning streak, particularly as he lost to Rafa 6-1, 6-0, at the Rome event in April. And if you watch Soderling running from corner to corner on clay, his strides are so long you wonder his feet don’t go out from under him with regularity.

But Soderling has those hard flat shots that gave Tomas Berdych and James Blake three match winning streaks over Rafa in 2005 and 2006. Then there’s David Nalbandian who still has a career winning record over Rafa. Nalbandian is a master at redirecting the ball, particularly off his backhand side that is not bothered a wit by Rafa’s high bouncing left forehand.

And then there was the semifinal in Madrid a few weeks ago when Novak Djokovic won point after point by hitting enough flat shots to Rafa’s backhand to open up the court for sharp angled winner to the forehand side. Djokovic had three match points and played the match of his life, but Rafa recovered from a sore knee in time to rise to the occasion and come up with just enough fantastic points to win the match.

The next day Rafa lost the Madrid title to Federer and so the stage was set for his loss today. Soderling, the hard hitting player who isn’t as good as Djokovic or Nalbandian at redirecting the ball but is a tall dude who isn’t bothered by the high bouncer to his backhand either, the sore knee in Madrid, the whispers that Rafa didn’t quite look himself in his early rounds in Paris, and today, an agitated, stressed out Rafa throwing his arms up in despair as another ball landed in the net or over the baseline.

And that was the most surprising part of the loss. Calmness. He’s the best fighter out there because he remains calm enough to maintain his focus. When someone asked him what happened to his calm in the post match media session, this was his response:

Well, I never was calm; that’s the truth. Instead of losing my calm, the match started off very badly for me. I mean, the second set, I should have won it 6‑4. …Then not being calm enough to face the important points, …I had to fight. But sometimes it’s not enough fighting. You have to play a good level of tennis.

And sometimes people think I win because I’m physically fit but, no. When I win, it’s because I play well, and that wasn’t the case today. I must say that at key moments I couldn’t take the opportunity because I was losing my calm, and I didn’t play well.

Here’s where we have to give Soderling a tremendous amount of credit because Soderling never allowed Rafa to reach a good level of tennis – he never allowed him to find his calm. After winning just one game off Rafa in Madrid, Soderling came into this match swinging for the lines and never stopped. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but it’s the only way Soderling was going to beat him and he persisted no matter what.

The first thing that comes to mind for me is Roger Federer. We’ve been screaming at him to attack Rafa and, instead, he tries one thing and if it doesn’t work he goes on to another. He’s not the same style of player as Soderling but he also isn’t as brave. He has more to lose. If Soderling loses to Rafa, well, no big deal. We expect that. If Roger loses to him, that’s one more reason why he won’t be the greatest.

But now that Roger beat Rafa at Madrid by attacking on the fast court and especially after watching Djokovic almost beat Rafa and Soderling finally finish him off with relentlessly aggressive tennis, I’m gonna tear my hair out if Roger does anything less should he meet Rafa again here next year.

The main entertainment during today’s match was trying to figure out when Soderling would fold. When would he start spraying his shots or hitting double faults? When would he start losing focus? When would he start acting surly and grumpy? He came close a few times.

After winning the first set easily then losing the second set in a tiebreak, Soderling looked liked he was going to lose his serve early in the third set but righted himself and broke Rafa to go up 4-3. Soderling served out to win the set but then lost his serve early in the fourth set to go down 2-0. Here we go, I thought, but then he broke back immediately at love. And as the fourth set progressed, Soderling found himself in the zone. His serve kept improving and his shots kept finding the lines.

On clay against Nadal, that’s only enough to get you to the tiebreaker, but if Soderling could serve his way through that, he had the win. He found himself up 6-1 in the tiebreak and it was his groundstrokes as much as his serve. A backhand dipper at the net that Rafa couldn’t handle, and Soderling had his win.

It looks like Roger’s main competition will come from Juan Martin Del Potro in his half of the draw and should he get past Del Potro, Nikolay Davydenko is threatening to get to the final because Andy Murray isn’t yet that good on clay. I don’t know about you, but now that Rafa can’t win the calendar slam – and I was looking for that because I want the greatest of all time list to look as funky and confused as possible, mainly because the longer you follow sports, the more you realize how rare sustained greatness is – my heart is all over Roger’s path to the final and his first French Open title. C’mon, man, don’t disappoint me now.

Let’s look at what’s happening in Paris and ask whether a second coming of Yannick Noah could win the French Open.

The French Open is getting up to speed kind of like a train groaning and creaking as it builds up enough steam to leave the station. If you were looking for an upset I guess you’d have to go with Maria Sharapova taking out Nadia Petrova in the second round.

I was wondering if Sharapova would ever recover from her shoulder problem, but that worry has now been replaced by the worry that her shoulder will never be the same. Her abbreviated service motion is not uncommon in the tennis world but will her serve ever be as ferocious as it was and, if it isn’t, is her legendary fighting spirit enough to win a few slams even without the ferocious serve?

The answer is: YES. And it’s a yes because women’s tennis now has parity meaning that there’s no Justin Henin anymore and Serena Williams is accumulating injuries and Dinara Safina can probably be outnerved by Maria. Unless Ana Ivanovic can gather her nerves and, like her fellow Serb Novak Djokovic, regain some dominance, then Maria is the fiercest competitor going who can still run, jump, and walk – kind of.

Ivanovic and Djokovic, by the way, are an interesting comparison in regards to the reasons for their post slam swoons. Whereas Djokovic showed bear-sized hubris by changing his racket during the season break and apparently foregoing off-court aerobic training judging by his exhaustion meltdown at the Australian Open, Ivanovic should steal a bit of Djokovic’ hubris because she is showing signs of needing to develop a few jagged edges to her sunny disposition.

When Ivanovic hired Martina Navratilova’s former coach Craig Kardon earlier this year, two things immediately came to my mind: 1. He’ll encourage Ivanovic to attack. 2. He was hired because he has experience with a physically talented player who needs to develop some fortitude – namely Martina. I hope it works so we can see some more of Ana taking on Maria.

Along with an upset we also have some drama and it’s unfortunate that it involves Jelena Dokic. Why is it that misfortune seems to follow people who were dealt a bad hand to begin with? Dokic’s crazy father was arrested in Serbia this month after he threatened to blow up the Australian embassy because his daughter told an Australian magazine that he’d physically abused her. And this is a guy who admits that he beat his daughter.

This afternoon, Dokic had a 6-2, 3-4, lead over Elena Dementieva when she had to retire after injuring her back. She dropped into her seat and it was a heartbreak to watch her sobbing into her towel because she’s been through so much already and now she’d lost a good chance at upsetting the number four player in the draw.

We also had some drama with a slightly happier ending. At least for Roger Federer. It’s hard to know if his win over Rafael Nadal in Madrid was an anomaly or not because the surface there is fast, but Federer absolutely looked like his vintage self after fighting off a Jose Acasuso set point at 2-5 in the third set then winning 12 of the last 15 games to advance to the third round, 7-6, 5-7, 7-6, 6-2.

This grainy video shows Yannick Noah playing the clown in a second round match against Magnus Larsson in the 1991 Hamburg Masters Series event. It’s hard to believe that this was a regular ATP event let alone Masters Series and even harder to believe that he won the match. Embarrassing is the word that comes to mind.

To be fair, Noah was at the end of his career and the guy is an entertainer with a successful singing career so what do you expect. I was looking at Noah videos because I wanted to remind myself that Noah had something in common with Jo-Wilfried Tsonga so I could ask the question: Can a showtime net guy win the French Open in 2009?

The showtime part is important because both Tsonga and Marcos Baghdatis powered their way to Australian Open finals on the strength of play and emotion and can you imagine the scene if Tsonga could make it to a quarterfinal or a semifinal in Paris? Complete bedlam. I pity his opponent.

The question, though, is whether anyone can beat Nadal by attacking the net relentlessly. Federer has refused to do it in Paris because he’s afraid of getting passed and it’s not really serve and volley, it’s more like slam the ball hard and flat and wide enough to get yourself to the net. Tsonga took out Juan Monaco today in a fabulous display of power and athleticism from both of them and it gave me hope that such a strategy could work.

And remember, the court was a lot slower when Noah won his slam. And Tsonga is not afraid – relentless is the only way he knows how to play. The problem is that Tsonga is the best candidate but he’s always either recovering from an injury or just about to be re-injured and it’s no longer a matter of luck. It’s either his structure or his mechanics and neither of those is going to change drastically.

Tsonga is the kind of player who can catch lightening in a bottle and he did play one of the most perfect matches I’ve even seen against Nadal in his Australian Open run, so he can win a slam and he could win the French Open, but not this year, certainly, because he missed most of April with an injury and he’s not tournament fit for a two week schedule of best of five matches.

But I wish I could crank up a video game with a totally healthy, top of his game Tsonga against a top of his game Nadal in Paris and see what happens. How do you think it would go?

Roger Federer answered some tough questions after he lost the French Open final to Rafael Nadal last year. Let’s take a look at his answers.

This will be a short post because I’m off to New Mexico tomorrow and I have to get ready. I’m going to The Lightning Field and The Very Large Array just south of Albuquerque.

The Lightning Field is a “Land Art” installation comprised of 400 stainless steel poles arranged in a grid that measures one mile by one kilometer. Apparently the best time to experience it is at sunrise so I’ll have to drag my butt out of bed at an ungodly hour once I arrive. The Very Large Array is also a grid. It consists of 27 dishes that each measure 82 feet in diameter arranged in a Y shaped grid. Each arm of the Y is 13 miles long.

The Very Large Array is used to detect evidence of extra-terrestrial life, among other things, and you probably saw it in Jodie Foster’s 1997 film Contact. If I don’t get fried by lighting or carted away by extra-terrestrials, I’ll be back for the early rounds of the French Open next week.

I thought about doing a boring French Open preview but luckily I’m prevented from doing that because the draw doesn’t go up until Friday. While I was rooting around the French Open website, I happened upon Roger Federer’s post match media session after he was walloped by Rafael Nadal in last year’s final, 6-1, 6-3, 6-0, and I was very impressed with the tough questions journalists threw at him. Here’s a short example:

Q. Has he improved since this day one year ago, and have you gone off?

ROGER FEDERER: …When you really cannot play your game and he can play exactly what he wants from the baseline, well, you end up with scores like this sometimes.

Which begs the question: Roger, why don’t you attack more at the net against Rafa? Because, Roger might say, the French Open is not the Madrid Masters where the air is thin and the clay is fast. There I had an advantage. In Paris I might get passed all day long.

Q. Rafa’s offensive skills are obviously improving, but do you believe that still on this surface great defense beats great offense?

I’ve always said it three years ago already: He plays like two forehands from the baseline because he has an open stance on both sides. I can’t do that, so I lose a meter or two here and there from the baseline. So he’s got a huge advantage in this aspect.

Two interesting points here: offense vs. defense on clay and open stances and the one handed backhand. Clearly defense means a lot more on clay because you can’t overpower your opponent as you can on a faster surface, but Roger correctly restates the question in terms of movement. Movement might be slightly less important on offense but if you’ve ever seen Rafa run around his backhand, scoop up a low ball then hit an inside out forehand that skitters off the court closer to the service line than the baseline, you can see why movement is the relevant skill.

As for Rafa’s open stance backhand, you can see what Roger means here:

There is such a thing as an open stance one-handed backhand but none of the pros do it by choice. It’s usually an emergency stroke. And it’s not just the distance Rafa gains with the open stance backhand, it’s his right hand. Rafa is right handed so when he’s out of position on his backhand, he can muscle the ball back with his right arm. We make a lot of the fact that Rafa’s high bouncing forehand goes in to Roger’s backhand but here’s a place where Rafa’s backhand works to his advantage too.

Roger would dearly love to win this event because it would tie him with Pete Sampras’s 14 slams, but it would also move him past Pete because Pete never won the French Open. It would be very important at the moment but I don’t know how long it would hold up. I’m pretty sure Rafa can win a U.S. Open before he’s done and that would give Rafa a career slam too. And though Rafa might not get to 14 slams, he has a good chance to win a calendar grand slam this year.

Is a calendar slam today worth more than Rod Laver’s calendar slams in the 1960’s? Probably an unanswerable question because it’s so hard to compare different eras. But if Rafa wins a calendar slam and adds a few more slams after that, and even if Federer gets his 14th slam, then Rafa is in the same sentence as Laver, Federer, and Sampras.

Two weeks from now, I have a feeling I might be reading an interview much like the one above.