On a wind-swept day at the US Open that had everyone complaining about the conditions, Roger Federer simply embraced them.
Choosing placement over power on his serve and using a handful of sublimely spinning drop shots to take advantage of gusty winds, Federer moved to within one win of his seventh straight final at Flushing Meadows with a 6-4, 6-4, 7-5 victory on Wednesday over Robin Soderling.
Could Federer, a five-time champion at America’s tennis championship, actually enjoy playing when the wind affects every toss, every groundstroke, even makes it hard to see?
PHOTO: REUTERS
“I do by now, because I see it as a challenge and I see it as an opportunity to play differently,” he said. “It’s not easy. It’s cold. Everywhere it’s blowing. You feel like it’s blowing through your ears and into your eyes.”
Everyone felt that way, including Vera Zvonareva and Caroline Wozniacki, who each won their matches to advance to the women’s semi-finals. Federer’s next opponent will be Novak Djokovic, who beat Gael Monfils 7-6 (2), 6-1, 6-2 in another windblown match.
“The conditions were maybe as difficult as we’ve seen so far in the tournament,” Djokovic said. “We didn’t have wind only one direction. We had it all over.”
Federer handled it best, though even he had a few problems.
Playing the man who beat him in the quarter-finals of the French Open, snapping his record streak of 23 straight Grand Slam semi-final appearances, one of Federer’s few lapses came midway through the third set, when he lost serve to fall behind 5-3.
No need to worry.
Faced with dropping his first set of the tournament, he opened up Soderling’s service game by hitting one of his drop volleys to get ahead. Then, he took something off his groundstrokes to mix things up — a fine strategy on a night where everyone had to adjust to the wind. All that mixing and matching paid off when Soderling dumped two forehands into the net to close out the game.
“The margin is small,” Soderling said. “There’s a couple points here or there. He played well at the end.”
The wind also played havoc in the Wozniacki match, though that picture may have been best illustrated by looking not on the court, but in her player-guest box, where her newest admirer, Donald Trump, watched on, his bouffant hair coming messed in the breeze.
“He called my agent and asked if there was going to be a space in my box,” Wozniacki said. “I said, ‘Of course, there’s always a place for Mr. Trump.’”
She beat unseeded Dominika Cibulkova 6-2, 7-5 in a match that featured 43 unforced errors from the loser.
“I would say it was the most difficult conditions I have ever played in,” Cibulkova said.
“It felt like we were playing in a hurricane or something,” Wozniacki said. “But it was the same for both players. I’m happy to get through.”
Earlier, Zvonareva was singing the same tune after her 6-3, 7-5 victory over No. 31 Kaia Kanepi, a match in which Kanepi committed a cringe-inducing 60 unforced errors.
The tone for the match was set early, when the players traded service breaks right away to make it 1-1, and they combined for 12 unforced errors and one winner through the first two games.
“The weather was definitely not for the good tennis out there,” Zvonareva said.
Taiwan’s Chan Yung-jan and China’s Zheng Jie reached the semi-finals of the women’s doubles by beating US duo Bethanie Mattek-Sands and Meghann Shaughnessy 6-4, 6-4. The No. 7 seeds will face Liezel Huber of the US and Russia’s Nadia Petrova for a place in Sunday’s final. The second seeds defeated Lisa Raymond of the US and Rennae Stubbs of Australia 6-4, 3-6, 7-5 in Wednesday’s other quarter-final.
Additional reporting by staff writer
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