Friday in Paris
by Pierre Cantin

Another day of tennis was waiting for me when I woke up at 7 AM and although it was pretty rough to get up from a 4 hour sleep, the thought of a Dokic-Dementieva rematch was enough to get me motivated. By the way, play did start at 2PM, I just didn't know the late schedule started on the Friday..how annoying is that ? lol..

So anyway, the first match on the schedule was Jelena's singles, the first of four quarterfinal matches to be played on centre court. Well the match started off pretty tough for Jelena who after 3 quick points, was already down a few break points but rallied back to make it 1-0. At that point, Dementieva was able to stay in the match mostly because she was hitting hard but also very consistent and getting to so many balls as she always does.. Jelena was having a rough time when she missed her 1st serve because Dementieva was taking control of the points.. At 3-3, with Jelena serving, things went a bit wrong as she quickly dropped to 0-40 with a few bad errors including a double fault. Despite trying to come back, Dementieva was able to come back and take the first break of the game to lead 4-3. They then won their serves pretty easily to get it to 5-4 for Dementieva with all the pressure on her. But a few stupid errors by Dementieva including a double-fault at 30-40 got things back to 5-5. Then, a few long rallies got things very interesting but unfortunatly, Dementieva was making less errors and was able to break to 6-5. Then, getting a second chance to serve out the set, Dementieva was able to serve much better and win the first set 7-5, in 40 minutes.

There was no doubt that Dementieva was playing very confident tennis and Jelena needed to act quickly if she wanted to get some chances to come back in the match. So with an easy hold to start off the set, Jelena was able to easily break Dementieva and then hold to get a 3-0 lead. Things were certainly taking a turn and it seemed increasingly clear that Jelena was playing with more and more confidence while Dementieva was running less and less balls from that point on. I think that once again, Jelena's high pace game paid off as Dementieva just did not have the shape to compete with Jelena... It was clear that Dementieva was in trouble but unluckily for her, things continued to go well for Jelena who even broke one more time to take the second set 6-1.

So it was now time for Dementieva to shift gears and she left the court to go change up and hopefully change the rythm at the same time..And it paid off very quickly as Dementieva won her serve and then played an outstanding game on Jelena's serve putting a lot of pressure on Jelena who just could not do much and saw her opponent jump to a 2-0 lead in the final set.. But that is when Dementieva played some very silly tennis..as she had just regained the momentum, she threw in 2 double faults and and an unforced error to be broken just as quickly.. Jelena had what she needed and from then on never looked back taking the match 5-7, 6-1, 6-2 and advancing to the semifinals where she will now meet Monica Seles who played great tennis defeating Justine Henin in straight sets.. Let's hope everything will go well! I will not be there to see Jelena live but I'll certainly be rooting wheter I manage to see it on tv or not..

Later on, Jelena took #1 court to play her doubles match with Maggie Maleeva as they faced Weingartner and Reeves. I only saw a bit of that match since there was outstanding singles at the same time on centre court but Jelena certainly seemed unhappy with her serving but other than that, things went rather well as they won the match 7-6, 6-2.