Less than 24 hours after Eugenie Bouchard’s shocking exit from the Rogers Cup, a little perspective has set in.
For starters, lots of top tennis players suffer ignominious losses along the way. The road to the top is almost always filled with axel-busting potholes.
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Bouchard, in fact, had suffered some surprising defeats this season prior to Montreal on Tuesday night sprinkled in among her three strong Grand Slam performances, including losses to a fading Francesca Schiavone, two to unremarkable American veteran Bethanie Mattek-Sands, one to Annika Beck and a one-sided loss to Elena Svitolina, Bouchard’s victim in that 2012 Wimbledon junior girls final.
Yes, being sandwich bageled in her hometown by Shelby Rogers was embarrassing and stunning. But such losses will happen, and the issue now is whether Bouchard can shake it off quickly and move on with the next tournament. That’s how tennis works. You pack up and hop a plane to the next city.
The worst element of Bouchard’s defeat? Unlike Milos Raonic, who has been beaten by players able to pick on his vulnerable areas, like his backhand or return of serve, it was Bouchard’s persona, her seemingly impregnable confidence and ability to play better on larger stages, that took the hit in this one.
It may take a little while to get that shield up again. And other players will have noticed, to be sure. Petra Kvitova overpowered her in London. But Rogers won Tuesday because Bouchard crumbled under the lights at Uniprix Stadium, and that bruise may take a while to heal.
It was, all in all, a crazy night in Montreal, one filled with power outages that unsettled the players and left the competition without scoreboards and the usual electronic instruments that accompany tennis at this level. Included among those were video review, which left players barking and whining at umpires and linesmen just like the bad old days when the sport hit the news often because a player was throwing a particularly nasty hissy fit.
It was a reminder of just how well video review has worked in tennis, arguably the sport that has benefited most from the advent of video review. Players, for the most part, trust and respect the system, which has taken a lot of time-wasting, unproductive arguments out of the sport and prevented players from looking like jackasses in prime time.
It’s not the reason tennis has both rebounded and expanded to new markets in recent years – credit Roger Federer and all the stars in both the men’s and women’s tours for that – but it’s one that has often been overlooked for the way in which it subtly changed the atmosphere around the game.
Based on Tuesday night, nobody should want to go back to the way it was.