Faulkner

It’s always interesting to see veteran players who’ve somehow avoided playing each other over the years. But if Nishikori and PCB win their matches tonight, they’ll have their first meeting ever in the AO R16.

The top women have really stepped up in a way they haven’t in MANY years.

^Yep. Like I said, classic Verdasco. He did the same thing at the end of the season down match point to lose the Shenzhen title to Nishioka.

A double fault on match point (or on someone else’s MP) is just classic Verdasco. Cilic is certainly more of a threat to Rog than Verdasco, who has only taken one set off Fed in six matches and that was 10 years ago. Tiafoe has a sick body:

That was probably an especially bitter pill for Caroline to swallow, given the animosity between those two. Maria gets Ash Barty next, whom she beat in Rome last year.

I just saw some of the highlights. Damn, she was really outhitting Aryna.

Wow, Anisimova beat the brakes off Sabalenka. I know Amanda is very good, but what happened there? I can’t watch many matches this year.

The Konta/Muguruza match started after midnight (latest start for the AO ever), and it’s STILL going on (after 3 am Melbourne time.) They were scheduled to play the last night session on MCA, but Zverev/Chardy went five sets, so they announced they were moving to Court 3. Unfortunately that court was covered in seagull poop, and the Open didn’t have enough staff at that point to clean up. So on to Margaret Court Arena they went. They could have moved them to any other court when they saw the Zverev match might run long. Meanwhile, Serena suffering no fools as usual: Muguruza just won, so here’s the R32:

Mess.

Raonic beat Stan, and Herbert took out Chung, whose ranking will plummet. Thiem apparently is suffering some kind of illness and retired against the young Aussie Alexei Popyrin. Serena waved off Genie rather easily and will play the winner of Halep/Venus(!) next after both won in three. This is a STAT:

My mom loved her some HBS as Margo. She almost dumped ATWT (her favorite) to watch OLTL with me when she saw HBS was playing Nora.

Wow at Kei pulling it out in spite of Ivo playing probably his best match in years. That was actually quite spellbinding.

So Ivo is redlining...

I follow Elina on IG but what? Monfils gets around the WTA circuit: Cibulkova, Cornet, most likely Azarenka.

I’ve heard previous interviews with Kay, and I never noticed she had such a pronounced stammer. Granted, those interviews were ages ago, so she could have acquired it over the years. And perhaps she was having trouble remembering or trying to be precise with her words (she is a writer, after all). Or she was trying to be diplomatic about difficult topics. Who knows? I just know, having done my share of editing podcasts and audio interviews over the years, he should have edited a lot of that out. It was extremely distracting and annoying. I’m not saying he should have the precision of an NPR producer (they can make the most inarticulate people sound like they’ve taken elocution lessons—it’s incredible). But it’s easy enough to remove “um’s and ah’s” (in a natural way) in Audacity or Garage Band even. I just hope Kay is open to more interviews. She seemed to be fond of this particular interviewer in spite of our criticisms, but he was also pretty sycophantic. I know @EricMontreal22 interviewed her for his thesis, so maybe she’s pretty accessible, but I’m sure there’s a lot she won’t divulge.

LMAO