Pakistan’s challenge at Wimledon 2012 will start on Tuesday as Aisam Qureshi and Jean-Julian Rojer take on the British pairing of Goodall and Ward. Should everything go according to plan, the duo will face its first real test in the pre-quarter finals against Granollers and Lopez of Spain. The third seeded Polish team of Fyrstenberg and Matkowski will be their projected foe in the quarters and a semifinal match up against the Bryan brothers in the semis. The team that ousted Aisam and Bopanna in a marathon first round match, Cabal and Farah, are in the Bryan’s quarter.
Novak Djokovic will start proceedings on Monday against a former world number one and French Open champion Juan Carlos Ferrero. In a chat with journalists, Djokovic stated that moving from the clay of Roland Garros to the grass at Wimbledon was difficult to accomplish in the two weeks that are presently available and that it would be better to have at least three weeks to adjust from the slowest to the fastest surface on the tennis circuit.
This year’s Wimbledon is perhaps the first since rankings have been kept, where three players have a chance to become world number one by winning the title. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and the current world number one Novak Djokovic definitely have a lot to play for.
The fourteen practice courts were busy over the weekend and on opening day. All the top players were getting some court time in between rain showers. This June in London promises to be the wettest in a hundred years, although the forecast for the first week is not too bad.
The busiest people are undoubtedly the stringers who man the twelve Prince stringing machines next to the practice courts. They expect to string 400 racquets a day during the first week. At £20 for a stringing job (the players supply their own strings) each lasting about fifteen minutes, it sounds like a nice payday.
But the pressures are also there. Each player wants his racquets precisely strung to exactly the right tension. Some use one string on the length strings and another on the cross strings. String technology has come a long way from the old gut strings made out of beef (not cat) intestines. The latest craze is the polyester strings, which allow the player to impart tremendous spin on the ball a la Rafael Nadal.
Players change their string tensions all the time, the stringers told me. If it is a wet day, the court and the balls will play heavy, so the racquets may be strung a couple of pounds looser. On a hot dry day, they would be strung tighter. The average string tension is between fifty and sixty pounds with the extremes being Bjorn Borg at 80 and John McEnroe at less than 50 pounds. Since the top players get their racquets restrung every day and change racquets every nine games, the costs can be quite significant. On the other hand, it costs Rs100 to get a racquet strung in Rawalpindi!
