Like everyone else, I can only imagine how John Isner and Nicolas Mahut are feeling after their singles match that captivated so many people. All I can say is that I had a pretty long doubles match myself yesterday and I don’t feel great. Jonathan Marray and myself took the top seeds, Daniel Nestor and Nenad Zimonjic, to 15-13 in the fifth set — and that after three tie-breaks.
I was starting to feel heavy towards the end of it, and when it finished, I felt much worse. Everything has seized up. I’ll be sore tomorrow, I’m sure. I started feeling my groin and hamstrings straight after I came off the court, and my body was stiff within an hour.
I have no idea how long it will take to recover, yet they played 113 games more than we did. I’ve never played a match like mine before. It lasted just over 4½ hours, but they took eight hours over the final set alone.
As for their mindset, again, I can only wonder. When we got to 10-10 in our match, it felt then that it was starting to go on and on. To play more than 100 games from that point — what do you say about that, other than that it’s amazing and ridiculous.
I watched the last ten games or so on Wednesday night when I got home. Even then, Mahut looked fine to me. He was in the zone; you wouldn’t know that he’d been playing for seven or eight hours.
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Isner was toast, but he was carrying a lot more around the court. It helped him enormously that he has such a great service action. I don’t think I could have continued serving, especially all those aces, as he did.
Everyone in the locker room was drawn to it, wondering when it would end. I mean, how could you not be? I’d like to have seen how it ended but we were out on court at the time. Many of the games went by quickly, which also happened in my match.
If you’re receiving, once it gets to 30-0, you start getting ready for your next service game. Even so, it was a quite phenomenal effort for them to go on that long. It is never, ever going to be matched again.
Even though it’s ridiculous to have to play that long, I’m not in favour of a fifth-set tie-break. The rule is that you play until you are two games clear, and Wimbledon is all about long fifth sets.
It doesn’t happen too often but it seems to be happening a lot this year already. Thiemo De Bakker, who is next up against Isner, won his match 16-14 in the fifth set. The crowd love it, and it’s better for them than a match that finishes 6-1, 6-2, 6-3.
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One thing common to that match and ours was that the guys serving first went on to win. I do think it’s easier that way round. Our opponents were never behind in the fifth set. The worst it got for them was a tie, while we were always playing catch-up. Every time we had to serve, it always felt like a last chance.
Our big chance to win it came in the third-set tie-break. We had a set point at 6-5 and I really felt we were going to win that tie-break. Zimonjic was starting to go off but we gave it back to them a little bit.
It’s a bit of a heartbreaker. I’ve had harder losses — if this was a semi-final it might have been different, but it was good to play so well. It was nice to match the pair who have been the world’s best for the past couple of years and to play to that level, especially over such a long match.
It was still disappointing to lose but we can’t fault ourselves for effort or performance. And however bad it feels in the morning, I’ll know there are two players who will be feeling a lot worse.