The rise of Stan the Man
Federer’s defeat was a bolt from the blue
It was Tuesday evening, around sunset. I got something to eat and drink and was ready to watch an all-Swiss affair on the red clay of court Suzanne Lenglen. It was the maestro, Roger Federer, against his Davis Cup teammate and good friend Stan Wawrinka.
I knew it would be a fiesty encounter if the past meetings at Wimbledon and ATP World Tour Finals were anything to go by. But what i witnessed was beyond belief; I was left stunned and rocked in my chair.
The signs were ominous from the start. Fedex was struggling to hold every single service game while Stan was at ease on his own. The struggle that Fedex faced was not due to his own inablities or the the conditions or the clay, but due to the sheer power of his compatriot’s groundstrokes.
This wasn’t your usual clay court fixture which generally is filled with long tiring rallies and multiple exchanges of breaks of serve. It was a testament to the resilience of the Swiss maestro that he didnt face numerous breaks.
Stan bullied the 17-time Grand Slam champion like never before. He didn’t give him a chance to stamp his authority even on his own serve, not even a single one. No one had dominated Federer like this before,not even Rafa. When the match got over, in some corner of my heart I was relieved that it had ended. And make no mistake, this wasn’t a one time wonder or a flash in the pan.
This has been building up for months. Being a Federer fan, it’s a shame that the man on the receiving end had to be him.
Can Stanimal go all the way?
Next up for Stan is the sole torch bearer of the so called golden generation of the French tennis, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. He is coming into this match in some serious form; he dispatched Berdych in the fourth round and then dismantled Nishikori which mind you is no mean feat.
This is probably the closest that any Frenchman has come to the French crown in the past decade or so. But to reach the podium Tsonga has to get through Stan the Man, which is his toughest assignment yet. I am hoping for an even contest but I doubt Stan will let that happen.
Everything is falling into place. No one this year has been able to stop the Serbian juggernaut, Novak Djokovic. Nadal on his most favoured surface couldn’t do it. Federer and Murray haven’t been able to do it. But if Stan reaches the final and in the mood that he is, he could be the one to do it.
Assuming that Djokovic gets past Murray and Stan past Tsonga, this most certainly would be the case of an unstoppable force encountering an immovable object. Nevertheless, in my opinion, this has been Wawrinka’s best Grand Slam performance yet, even better than his Austrailian Open triumph last year – simply because of his sheer dominance of his opponents.
Stan the Man has finally risen and is out of the shadows of his Swiss compatriot. He is now ready to conquer the world; can anybody stop him?