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Tennis Anyone?

• Listening to: Rurouni Kenshin - Warrior Suite

The warm weather of Melbourne is usually associated with the Australian Open. Heh, it’s amazing that players can duke it out for more than 2 hours under this kind of weather conditions (30+ degrees celcius).

Was at the pub with Pi Ang last night sampling some Mountain Goat from the tap (it tastes different from the bottled versions, apparently cause they are shipped regularly and hence, should be fresher. Yes, beer needs to be fresh to taste good as well) at a local pub. The men’s semi finals was telecasted life with Roger Federer and Marat Safin playing their guts out to proceed to the final.

It was already towards the end of the fourth set when we were watching. This match sparked my interest again in tennis as a sport. I’ve been to the Australian Open twice in previous years and had a ground pass, so I could just hop from arena to arena to catch a glimpse of various star players. I learnt the rules back then, which are plenty cryptic unless you had someone explain it to you (golf is still cryptic to me, although I’ve promised myself to learn that sport one day).

Back to the match, it was a plenty exciting match, with the audience cheering and the emotional stress you see the players going through seems to highlight what’s at stake on a match at this stage. I’m not one for tennis techniques, so I don’t know if a player is playing fantastically or poorly. I do, however, know the basic rules and this is the kind of sport where in order to win, you have to persevere to the very end. Not an easy thing to do, and it requires a lot of endurance. Men’s matches in the semi finals (or so I’ve noticed) can last 5 hours or more, since both parties want very much to win.

Was watching the score bobbing up and down between match point, then tie break etc. Heh, I was watching intently until Safin broke Federer and won the fourth set, making them even to two sets each. So it needed just one more set to be settled.

Only just found out that Safin had won the match, and looking at the score line: 5-7 6-4 5-7 7-6 (8-6) 9-7, you know it was an exciting match. So Safin goes on to face Lleyton Hewitt in the finals, as the latter beat Andy Roddick in tonight’s match.

Won’t be watching the match, but will be supporting Safin this Sunday. Heh…