Silly Little Country

Thiemo De Bakker is Surely Smiling

He is slated at Wimbledon to play the winner of the Nicholas Mahut-John Isner match.
When I switched over from a World Cup match to Wimbledon, this was the match on screen and there was a clear misprint in the score as it said they were tied at 2-set each, and 58-58 in the fifth set. I switched back in annoyance to some talking heads.
And now I learn that the current score in the match, when play was suspended for darkness, was 4-6, 6-3, 7-6(9-7), 6-7(3-7), 59-59.
Read all about it here.
Isner has 98 aces, a record in the history of the sport. (Mahut has 95 which is also far beyond the old record.)

By the time the contest was halted, the two protagonists could barely stand, let alone make it back to the locker room. But they will have to make the return journey on Thursday, when the match resumes as the third match on the same court.
...
To quickly sum up the key records: 10 hours is a new record for the longest tennis match played at Wimbledon, at any Grand Slam, in fact anywhere since someone first picked up a racket and decided to thwack a ball with it. And for those who measure length by the number of games in a match, it set a new record by that measure as well. And there's at least two more games to come.
At the start of the afternoon, everyone was wondering whether Isner could finish up where he had left off and set a new record for aces struck in a Wimbledon match, the 78 held by Ivo Karlovic. By the end of the day, he had knocked the particular record into next weekend by setting a new mark of 98. But by the end of play tomorrow, it could be even higher or he could himself be eclipsed by a certain Mr N Mahut, who has smashed down 95 so far and counting.

Those poor guys.
UPDATE: I had not realized but discovered from another blog (sorry, forgot which), but these poor guys started late on Tuesday!

posted by Alan Adamson @ 8:16 PM