French Open Day 4

What a weird day of tennis. It was interrupted by rain for some time, and it really separated two different days of tennis. The start of the day was full of blowouts. Federer and Venus Williams breezed through their second round matches, while Robin Soderling and JW Tsonga dropped a combined today of seven games. Flavia Pennetta, Nadia Petrova, and Caroline Wozniacki also made it through with relatively little difficulty.

But after the rain delay, things changed. The matches that remained ended up being very tight, even though they didn't have time to finish most of them. John Isner is down a set to Marco Chiudinelli, and Andy Murray is up a set over Juan Ignacio Chela, but the second set looked tighter. Baghdatis is up two sets after dropping the first to Marcel Granollers. The final match that is left to finish is probably the most ridiculous - Gael Monfils ended up at 5-all against Fabio Fognini, but it was quite a road to get there.

Monfils won the first two sets and looked to be cruising, but then things took a turn. The Frenchman lost the plot, and Fognini won the next two sets, then went up a break in the fifth. At around the time that all the other matches were being called on account of darkness, Monfils broke back to even the score at four-all. At this point, there was a grievous error in judgment. The local boy had the momentum, and the tournament director apparently didn't want to make the call to suspend the match. It's not entirely clear to me what happened, but he appeared to give them a choice about whether or not they wanted to continue playing.

Fognini wanted to stop, and he argued for six minutes and was eventually penalized a point for delaying the game, in what I think was a pretty classless move. Fognini was nearly broken, and Monfils would have been able to serve out the match. But after he held, things got really interesting. Monfils started to cramp - he couldn't get up to serve, he could barely move, and he was four points from defeat. Under normal circumstances, Fognini could have put him away, but it was so dark that he could barely see the ball. It was close, and Monfils saved two match points, but he eventually held. The match was suspended at 5-5, but it should have happened at 4-4. It's a good thing the match wasn't won or lost based on the tournament director's decision.

It was a similar situation in defending champion Svetlana Kuznetsova's match. She was down 40-0 while her opponent, Andrea Petkovic, was serving for the match in the second set. Petkovic had been smacking winners for two whole sets, but at that point she tightened up and hit a couple errors in a row. Kuznetsova broke, took the second set 7-5, and then won the third 6-4. A good win, in the end. But it doesn't get much closer than that. Here's hoping that was a turning point and not a sign of things to come.

Looking ahead to tomorrow, the most exciting matches might be the ones from yesterday that are left to finish. But there are some others that should be exciting. Rafael Nadal plays Horacio Zeballos - Nadal should still win, but Zeballos will prove more of a challenge than Gianni Mina did. Ana Ivanovic plays Alisa Kleybanova, which is a great test for the former champion. And Kei Nishikori plays Novak Djokovic - this match is a big question mark. Djokovic has not been playing at his best, and Nishikori has been off the court for so long. It could be an interesting match, if Djokovic isn't playing his best and Nishikori is back to top form.

There are other great matches. Ivan Ljubicic plays Mardy Fish and David Ferrer plays Xavier Malisse. Justine Henin is in action, and so is Serena Williams. Andy Roddick plays Blaz Kavcic in a match that I'm really looking forward to. Kavcic is less accomplished than Nieminen, so if Roddick plays a bit better than he did in that match, he should come through this one. There's a fairly good chance that an American (other than a Williams sister) will make it to the third round. I find it likely that tomorrow's matches will be a bit less exciting than the drama that we went through today. Could it really match up?