Alexander Zverev is in the US Open final. The world number 2 beat Karen Khachanov in three sets: 6-3, 7-6 (7), 7-6 (6).
Our intern copied the score into his notebook, then stopped at the brackets.
Silly question, but: why are there numbers in brackets, and why are they different ones? Someone told me a tie-break is first to 7. Except here, at 7-all, apparently you carry on. And at 6-all in the other one, you carry on too. So the thing invented to make the set shorter is allowed to not stop. I asked three people and got three answers, one of which started with “it’s tradition”. Fine, but what does that mean?
He then noticed that out of three sets, only one, the 6-3, finished without any brackets at all. The other two both went to 7-6. He has underlined this twice.
So the first set ends the way the rules seem to describe, and then the next two go into the emergency system. Twice. I checked, and it turns out nobody finds that unusual. I do. If two thirds of the match needs the backup plan, at what point does the backup plan become the plan?
The rest of the notebook is given over to the part Maxime finds strangest. According to L’Équipe, Zverev had stopped believing after a difficult start to the tournament. He said he had thought: “There’s no point, I’m not going to do anything here”. He is playing the final.
So if I’ve followed this correctly, he announced in public that he would do nothing, and then did the second best thing available. I’m writing that down somewhere, because in other sports, when somebody says that, people listen. Anyway, I still have a lot to learn.
He also asked whether a player who says that and then reaches a final is allowed to say it again next week, and whether it works every time. The newsroom told him this was not a rule. He wrote down “not a rule” and put a question mark next to it, because he had already been told that about the brackets.
Zverev will play the US Open final. Two pages of questions about how you get from 40 to a deciding game are still in the notebook, and the newsroom will deal with them later.
It’s true, we checked: L'Équipe.
