Roger’s return is short but sweet
ROGER FEDERER has now won more Wimbledon matches than any man ever, namely 85, leaving Jimmy Connors’ gigantic body of work one behind him.
But of all the records the great Swiss has collected in his unparalleled rampage through tennis landmarks few can have felt more hollow than the one surrendered to him 43 minutes into a dubious farce.
It was at that point that his opponent, Alexandr dolgopolov, shook Federer’s hand to gasps of disappointment from the Centre Court crowd.
The score was 30-30 in the fourth game of the second set and Federer had his white sneakers right on the Ukrainian’s throat. But it was the pain in dolgopolov’s right ankle that officially caused his withdrawal a little after tea-time on the first Tuesday.
The rumbles of discontent were a far cry from the cheers that had greeted Federer’s entrance, a favourite son starting his campaign for an eighth title in SW19 — the one record he seeks more avidly than any other.
There was slender evidence to assess Federer’s form, but still there were glimpses of the kind of tennis that took him to success this year in the Australian Open, at Indian Wells and Miami, and in preparation for Wimbledon at Halle. The futility of dolgopolov’s task may have been a factor in his early shower.
Now ranked 84, but once 13th in the world, he said: ‘I had my foot taped and it felt comfortable in the first set.
‘The injury got worse and I took the decision to stop. It was troubling me on the serve.’
What about the suspicion that he would never have started but for the loser’s cheque of £35,000?
‘You are going to have that,’ he said. ‘You cannot know how badly injured players are.
‘I could not be 100 per cent sure before the match that I could get to the end. But I had practised for an hour yesterday, not come out of a wheelchair.’