John Isner is Becoming the Marathon Man of Tennis
Somewhat strangely, I haven’t been following the Roland Garros this year, only glancing over the first round results for singles a couple of days ago. However, last night I went through all the results so far for both singles and doubles and noticed one match that stood out due to its length: Paul-Henri Mathieu defeated John Isner 6-7 (2-7) 6-4 6-4 3-6 18-16 in the fourth longest match in Grand Slam history, lasting five hours and 41 minutes.
Seeing as he entered the history books in 2010, after winning the longest match in the history of tennis, against Nicolas Mahut, at Wimbledon, it sure seems like Isner is becoming the marathon man of tennis, at least when his opponents are French, even if this time he lost. Granted that this match has nothing whatsoever on that one, but it’s obvious that something quite like that will probably never happen again, so we have to leave that one aside and compare what happened now to the other very long matches, in which case it ends up looking quite impressive. For one, it set a new record for most games played in a match at Roland Garros ever since the tie-break has been introduced, so it can claim to be the most tightly contested match of this traditionally very tactical tournament.
But now that the tournament caught my attention this year as well, I’m going to watch what I can. Of course, it’s highly unlikely that a second such match will take place during this year’s competition and in fact, as 2010’s record also proves, they generally take place during the first couple of rounds anyway, but the Roland Garros is the tournament that I generally follow the most anyway. So let’s see what Andreas Seppi will manage against Novak Djokovic now, after surprisingly winning the first two sets.
Edit: He lost. 4-6 6-7 (5-7) 6-3 7-5 6-3 for Djokovic.
