French Open 2016: Day 7 Highlights

The day 7 of French Open was disheartening for the French fans as their world no.1 in Jo Wilfried Tsonga bowed out of the tournament. Playing against Gulbis, Tsonga was leading in the match 5-2 before he was forced to retire due to a thigh injury which came as a huge shock to the French fans, who had extremely high hopes from him, with Tsonga holding a world ranking of no.6, highest in the world for a French player. Gulbis thus has entered into the next right in spite of trailing 2-5 in the first set.

Novak Djokovic continued his consistent performance in French Open 2016 – not losing even a single set so far, with yet another easily clinched victory over Aljaz Bedene 6-2 6-3 6-3. Djokovic now moves to the last 16 and this is where matches start to get more crunchier and players from the main draw with high rankings start facing each other – but do Djokovic’s opponent have what it takes to stop him!

In the women’s draw we had the Williams Sisters hitting the clay court with the hope to make it to the top 16 and as we covered in our last day’s report, both the Williams sisters are placed in the same draw which means that they’ll come face to face in the semi-finals, should they both progress to that stage of the tournament – by the looks of things, it definitely does seem that they’ve a good chance of making it.

The younger sister in Serena Williams, currently the world no.1 in WTA faced Kristina Mladenovic in the 4^th round of the French Open, with Mladenovic being the home crowd’s favorite as she’s French. In spite of the crowd in her favor, the Serena storm was hard to stop. The French did show some fight and though she lost the first set, she fought back well in the 2^nd, taking it to a tie-break, at which point the game had to stop due to a rain delay. Upon the return to the clay court, Serena was fresher than before and won 6-4 7-6 (12-10).

Venus Williams is someone who ruled the women’s tennis for around 4-5 years from 2004 to 2009 but has fallen down from the pinnacle of success due to her fitness issues and also perhaps her age (35), which makes it hard to survive in this sport that demands extreme fitness. The last 6 years have been relatively tough on Venus who has failed to enter top 16 of a grand slam but the French open 2016 comes as a welcome change as she’s through to the top 16, beating her 4^th round opponent in Alize Cornet 7-6 (7-5), 1-6 6-0. The first set was intense which moved to the tie-break in which Venus kept her cool and with nerves of steel, seized the set 7-5. Cornet fought back aggressively in the 2^nd and it looked like the match could be anyone’s at the stroke of the rain delay but the 3^rd set was a show of Venus Williams’ extreme genius which left Cornet bawling for the ball – evicted in the 4^th round.

The former no.1 in women’s tennis, Ana Ivanovic, faced Svitolina for her 4^th round clash and while Ivanovic has had the better of Svitolina in all their last 7 encounters; this match belonged to Svitolina who won with the score line 6-4 6-4, evicting the current world no. 14 from Rolland Garros 2016.

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