A long day that finally caught up with him
There are tournaments where everything comes at you too quickly for one body to handle. On Friday in Gstaad, Quentin Halys found that out the hard way. He had already qualified just before noon after a bruising battle with defending champion Alexander Bublik, then had only a few hours to recover before heading back out in the afternoon. His next opponent? Another Kazakh, Alexander Shevchenko, in a quarter-final that had trap written all over it before a ball had even been struck.
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Sunshine at last, and legs that would not follow
On paper, the conditions should have helped him. The sun, missing all week on the Swiss clay, had finally shown up, making the rallies cleaner and the court quicker, exactly the sort of setup that suits Halys and his heavy hitting. But you still need legs to make the most of it. In that second outing of the day, the Frenchman simply ran out of them.
The first set told the story. Halys hung in there, stayed in the fight, then completely froze when it mattered in the tie-break. He led 5-3, only to let Shevchenko back in with a flood of forehand errors, often from positions where he should have done damage. The Kazakh, also out there for his second match of the day, needed no second invitation. He got level, then closed it out with a ruthless smash on his first set point.
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Six match points saved, and a Kazakh who nearly cracked
The second set looked like it was heading for the script everyone could see coming. Halys tried to spark something, including a serve-and-volley move on a break point, but he just didn’t have the freshness to make it work. The volley dropped into the net. Shevchenko moved 4-2 ahead, and that was that, or so it seemed.
Tennis has a habit of reminding everyone that a match is never quite over until the last point is played. On Shevchenko’s serve, with defeat looming, Halys produced his best tennis of the day. What followed was a marathon game, utterly mad, in which he saved six match points in a row. Some came from better striking, others from the growing tension in Shevchenko’s camp, including a double fault on the sixth chance. A nasty wobble for a man who had felt the win was there for the taking for several minutes.
Seven was the number that stuck
It still took more to knock the Kazakh off course completely. On the seventh match point, the good one, Shevchenko shut the door and booked his place in the Gstaad Open semi-finals with a 7-6 (5), 6-3 win.
The defeat will sting. Playing two matches in one day against two different opponents on demanding clay is a tightrope act that very few keep walking to the end, and Halys had been on that rope since before lunch. He never stopped scrapping. His body had been telling him to pack it in long before the finish, and for one wild game on Shevchenko’s serve, he did not listen.
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