Wow. I didn’t see it. I must assume they were both good servers but poor returners?
Or were they returning well, with a fair number of 30-30/deuce games, but in the end those games went to the server?
I didn’t see the match and only had access to periodic updates at work, but from what I could see it seemed like the players both ran out of gas yesterday and got to the point where they could barely even summon the energy to move very far to return the other guy’s serve. This was why there were so few opportunities for service breaks all through the day yesterday.
It came on over here after the US-Algeria match and was already in the fifth set at 26-25. There weren’t a lot of ground strokes going on: big booming serves followed by an approach to the net and the put-away volley. At first I couldn’t figure out why the fifth set score showed that way: had they switched to a total point count for the fifth set? No - IT WAS THE GAME SCORE!!!!!
John Isner is one of the best servers in the business.
Mahut is a grass specialist. Both are ok grass players who have never had a breakout at wimbledon. For Mahut, it’s been difficult draws, and for Isner, he usually gets broken once and that’s enough.