The main character on X. The crisis club in the Premier League. The tennis player mentioning Tennis TV during a tennis match broadcast on Tennis TV.
As the new adage goes, every day there is always one, and the goal is never to be it. Unfortunately for world No 88 Corentin Moutet, on a chaotic Monday night in Madrid, he was it.
The Frenchman faced then world No 111 Juncheng Shang — who frequently goes by Jerry — in the round of 128, and the duo produced the wildest match of the year so far. Shang prevailed, moving up to No 103 with a victory against a player who he said afterwards was the only one he didn’t want to face in the first round.
Tennis is frequently gripping — a stressful seesaw back-and-forth, as players push each other to and beyond their limits, climbing a ladder of quality from which someone always has to fall in the end. Tennis is less often pandemonium, not nail-biting but headspinning, elements like “points” and “rallies” swept away in favour of misrule and chaos.
Here, The Athletic breaks down the tiebreaks, coffee request, water-based let and flying racket that defined almost four hours in the Spanish capital.
In the context of everything that followed, the first-set tiebreak was somewhat normal.
By that point, Moutet had already squandered seven set points, in a match that would ultimately be defined by absurd profligacy on both sides as much as points won.
At 6-6, Moutet lured Shang into a game of cat-and-mouse with a short-angle.
But he turned Moutet from feline to rodent, dinking the ball cross-court to take the point; move a set point up; and inspire the Frenchman to dip into some ball abuse.
Still, Moutet wouldn’t be denied, and won the tiebreak 11-9, the least he could do on his ninth set point.
The duo played out 290 points in a contest that lasted three hours and 59 minutes — just four minutes shy of the 2009 semi-final between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, which at the time was the longest match in ATP tour history. That was the kind of gripping, scarcely believable ascent that characterises so many of the best tennis matches of all time. This was more of a premium-quality circus.
Shang recovered in the second set, dominating Moutet with his forehand to quickly move up 3-0. At the changeover, Moutet spoke to the umpire. He wanted coffee. He could not have coffee.
“I saw on Tennis TV they provide coffee,” he said, descending into the online pits no one wants to enter and echoing Daniil Medvedev’s line after a strange hindrance call against Alexander Bublik in Toronto in 2021.
“Why can’t you provide me coffee? Is it because I’m on Court 4? Tell me!”
Moutet got his coffee from a spectator, the sport’s anti-doping regulations apparently not crossing his mind, but lost the set. But then he came back, in a match which, despite both players opening up substantial leads, whether on the scoreboard or in creating opportunities, was ultimately decided by a few points. The tennis scoring system, how we love thee.
We arrive at 0-3 in the third, with Moutet three games away from defeat and serving at 15-15. He misses his first serve, and sends a weak rally ball into Shang’s forehand off his second, before this happens:
Although the optics would have been better if Moutet had been drenched, a sprinkling of water (and a suddenly erupting hose) understandably put him off, even if it wasn’t all that likely he was going to recover the point.
One normal day of Corentin Moutet, that’s all we ask. It will never happen.
Skip forward. It is 5-5 in the final-set tiebreak this match deserves. Moutet is serving. This crucial point will no doubt be totally normal.
Moutet hits a good serve which pushes Shang deep in the court, forcing a return that he could easily have taken out of the air with a volley. Except he has momentarily metamorphosed into a footballer, because his racket has flown out of his hand, forcing him to swing a frustrated foot and concede the point.
Shang would take the match (on his fifth match point, to continue the theme of squandered opportunities) and come through a chaotic kind of classic. Moutet still had time to save one of those match points by hitting the net cord with a forehand, the ball willing itself over on the fumes of the caffeine he finally received in the second set.
In the end, it was not gripping, but it was disorienting, a whirling dervish of racket and ball — and too-powerful hoses.
In the press conference following, Shang was so thrilled with it all that he wouldn’t have minded losing.
“On clay, it was very tough physically against an amazing player like Corentin. The level was insane. Even had I lost, I would not have had regrets. It was almost the perfect match for me,” he said.
Moutet was equal parts glowing, furious, and philosophical, lambasting the ATP for not moving his match after coming through qualifying, but saying that “even when the body is weak, the heart is still there.”
First-round matches, even at Masters 1000 events, don’t tend to live long in the memory.
These nearly four hours of pandemonium in Madrid will endure.
(Top photo: ATP/Tennis TV)
