Day at the tennis!

Friday
We had a great day today up at the Western and Southern Open tennis tournament, just a little north of us in Mason. This tournament is just a step down from the grand slam tournaments, and barring injury, features all the top players on the tour. We have often talked about going, but have never got around to it before - quite often of course we have been away, often in England or Europe, and of course when Roger was working, we had less flexibility! So we weren’t sure exactly how things worked. You can buy a ticket for Center Court, either from 11am to 5pm or for the evening - they play under lights, so they do go on quite late. We had chosen the daytime tickets, and were just praying it wouldn’t be a dreadfully hot and humid day! It turned out to be hot, but not unbearable! We knew the ticket also allowed us into the other courts, but we weren’t sure what happened when 5 pm came around. We discovered the outer courts have predominantly open seating, and your ticket is good on those all day - it’s just your Center Court ticket which expires at 5 pm. The scoring for the men is different to Wimbledon for example, being the best of three sets rather than five, but it was the scoring of the men’s doubles which I found really confusing, in that the third deciding set is replaced by a tiebreaker, which I didn’t like at all! Today was the quarter finals, and we got to see one of the women’s quarter finals, two of the men’s quarter finals - we were really disappointed to hear that Roger Federer had been put out the previous day by a young relatively unknown Russian - and two men’s doubles, including Andy Murray and his partner Lopez from Spain against Jamie Murray and his partner Neal Skupski. Andy and Lopez won the first set, then Jamie and Skupski the second, then Jamie and Skupski won the tiebreak for the third set. The nice thing about this game was it was on Grandstand court, where you are even closer to the action than Centre Court! Unfortunately we didn’t get to see Djokovich as he was playing Center Court in the evening, when our tickets were no longer valid! They have a very nice set up there, with a food court area and varied seating between the courts with big screens set up, so you can still keep track of the games, when you take a break to get something to eat or drink. We feel we got our money’s worth, staying until about 9.30 pm!