5/23/11 4:55 PM | Cheryl Murray
Tomas Berdych fell victim to Stephane Robert, a little-known Frenchman won had never won a 5-set match before.
Last year, Tomas Berdych made the semifinals at the French Open and he came into Paris as the No. 6 seed. This year he wasn’t even to win a single match against a French qualifier ranked 140 in the world.
Make no mistake, Robert played perhaps the match of his life on Monday. The Frenchman returned particularly well to secure 7 breaks of the Czech’s serve. He was solid off the baseline and kept his cool long enough to take advantage of Berdych’s strange collapse after winning the first two sets easily.
The two men finished the lengthy 5-set match having won the exact same number of points (154 each). The problem for Berdych is that too many of them came in the first two sets, where the Czech was dominant.
Berdych’s loss leaves a gaping hole at the top of Novak Djokovic’s section of the draw. Marin Cilic was to have been the other top seed in that section and he lost in the first round as well.
Robert will take on Italy’s Fabio Fognini in the second round.
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