Good Luck Watching Nadal v. Djokovic in the U.S.; No Live TV Coverage!
Sucks to be a tennis fan in the U.S. today. On arguably one of the most appealing semifinal lineups of the year live coverage from the French Open today is non-existent here in the U.S. At least I haven’t found any. Not on my TV and I have like 800 channels! ADHEREL
I just woke up, flipped on the Tennis Channel looking to catch what’s happening in the Novak Djokovic-Rafael Nadal match and instead I’m getting a replay of the women’s semifinal between Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic, which would be fine if it was yesterday! But of course it isn’t, it’s Friday, men’s semifinal Friday. Where’s my Nadal v. Djokovic, and the Roger Federer vs. my man Gael Monfils to follow?
Ah yes, that’s right, NBC has the coverage today and Tennis Channel has replays later tonight. And NBC is doing again what NBC does best, that is not showing live tennis!
Just great. We can watch live coverage all week thanks to the ESPN/Tennis Channel combo, but as soon as we get down to the wire we get screwed with NBC which seems to go out of its way to torpedo out sport. No wonder tennis is so in the dumps here.
To the match. Nadal is up 6-4, 2-1 with a break in the second as I write. And that sounds about like how it should go. No real surprise and I don’t think Novak is going to get a set out of this deal.
Nadal’s just at a different level at Roland Garros where he’s beaten Novak the last two years pretty easily. So I don’t look for anything to change, but I’d still like to watch it live. Especially if Rafa really starts hammering Novak, he might just retire again!
As for the second match, I’d love to see Monfils pull the upset over Federer, but it’s a tall task. Monfils simply cannot employ the strategy he used against the powerless David Ferrer, and hang 20 feet behind the baseline and play defense because Roger will take the net away or just start-up with that new drop shot of his.
Hopefully Gael will have a big serving day first, and then really crack his forehand, make smart decisions and lull Federer into some errors. Then again since NBC is coming on tape in about 90 minutes with Djokovic/Nadal, I won’t be able to see the Monfils/Federer match live either, so who cares…If the tournaments/Slams fail to make certain that the networks they contract to broadcast their events don’t care enough about showing the crucial matches live, why should we?
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