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German Andrea Petkovic says Hall of Famer Steffi Graf has told her she’s going to attend one of Germany’s upcoming Fed Cup ties. Since retiring in 1999, 22-time Grand Slam champion Graf has rarely made appearances at pro tournaments. “The last time I talked to her was during Fed Cup. She called our Fed Cup captain, Barbara [Rittner], during the dinner before it started and wished us all good luck,” said Petkovic, who reached her first Roland Garros quarterfinal with a three-set win over Maria Kirilenko. “She told us that she’s going to come to one of the next Fed Cup ties, so I really hope I can see her again there. And maybe I’m planning on before the U.S. tour going to Las Vegas again [where Graf lives with her husband, Andre Agassi], so I should see her there.”

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Five-time Roland Garros champion Rafael Nadal, who has taken to in-depth self-analysis during this year’s tournament, breaks down his last five French Open appearances, where he has won four titles. Nadal won his first crown in 2005 and went undefeated until the fourth round of 2009, when Robin Soderling upset him. He won the title again last year. He’s back in the quarterfinals again and will face Soderling on Wednesday.

“In 2006 I think I didn’t play well during all the tournament; in 2007, normal; 2008, I played fantastic, but I played fantastic especially quarterfinals, semifinals, and final,” he told reporters. “2009 I think I played terrible all the tournament; 2010, so-so. Much better semifinals and finals than previous matches. Very so-so, in my opinion, no?”

“This year, especially the second match [a straight set win over Pablo Andujar) was especially bad. First match [a five-set win over John Isner] wasn’t that bad. Second match was bad level. Third match was positive [a straight set win over Antonio Veic]. And today [a straight-set win over Ivan Ljubicic] for moments was fine.”

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PARIS (AP)—Lethargic at times and brooding at others, Andy Murray worked his way into the French Open quarterfinals by coming back to beat Victor Troicki 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 6-2, 7-5 Tuesday in a match that started a day earlier.

The three-time Grand Slam runner-up won the final five games of the fifth set despite injuring his right ankle in the previous round. The first four sets were played Monday before darkness suspended the match.

Later Tuesday, Roger Federer is to face Gael Monfils for a spot in the semifinals. Also, defending women’s champion Francesca Schiavone is playing Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova of Russia.
 
Murray looked out of it in the opening two sets on Court Suzanne Lenglen, often pacing around the clay with his head low and sometimes screaming to no one in particular. But he soon started placing his shots and quickly worked his way back into the match before play was suspended.

When the match resumed Tuesday, the pair held serve until Troicki broke for a 4-2 lead shortly after a ball boy interfered with play on a point won by the 15th-seeded Serb. Troicki complained, but the point was replayed and Murray eventually took a 15-0 lead.

Two games later, Troicki was serving for the match. He took a 30-0 lead, meaning he was two points from victory, when Murray rallied again and broke back.

It is the fifth time in the 24-year-old Murray’s career that he has come back from two sets down to win. The fourth-seeded Briton is now 11-5 in five-set matches.

A fortunate bounce over the net helped Gael Monfils earned a crucial break of David Ferrer in their fourth-round match at the French Open. Up 2-1 in the decisive set of their match, which started Sunday and had to be pushed back because of darkness, Monfils earned a break point when his backhand tapped the net cord and fell on Ferrer’s side of the court.

Replays and pictures showed that the ball may have had a push from a secondary source:

Every little bit counts, right?

Ferrer would break back at 3-5 in the fifth set to force an extended fifth set, before Monfils broke in the 14th game to win 6-4, 2-6, 7-5, 1-6, 8-6. The Frenchman will play Roger Federer in Tuesday’s quarterfinal. This will be the third French Open matchup between the players in the last four years.

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PARIS—There’s been a lot to follow: top-tier upsets, second-tier moonwalking, and stretcher-assisted exits on the women’s side; on the men’s, we’ve had twilight battles, diet secrets, and the first case of fake cramps in world history. Now it’s time, after all the watching and the writing and the running around of the last 10 days, to look at the draw again, to get back to fundamentals and find out what the heck is happening in in this tournament. Who are we? How did we get here? What’s in store for us? The quarterfinals seem like a good opportunity to find out the answer to these and the other deep questions that are perplexing Roland Garros at the moment. Let’s slow it all down and take it match by match.

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Svetlana Kuznetsova vs. Marion Bartoli (Head-to-head: Kuznetsova leads 3-1)
I guess with the WTA we should just do our best to forget current form when we get to a Slam. Not only are the top three seeds and last year’s runner-up gone, but so is Julia Goerges, champion in Stuttgart and leading potential breakout story in Paris. Meanwhile, Svetlana Kuznetsova, who has had a disastrous 2011 since sending Justine Henin out of the sport in Australia, is alive and blasting in the final eight.

There she’ll play another surprise, France’s Marion Bartoli, the madly determined, and perhaps just plain mad, conqueror of Goerges. Bartoli is the higher seed, Kuznetsova is the more accomplished player. Kuznetsova won their first three matches, Bartoli won their last one easily in Key Biscayne in 2010. Kuznetsova has won this tournament, Bartoli wants it more than anything. The only prediction I’ll make is that Bartoli will make it interesting, provided that she doesn’t wake up and realize that she’s a French player playing in France.

Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova vs. Francesca Schiavone (Head-to-head: Schiavone leads 2-1)
This is especially intriguing. On the one side, you have the defending champion, who is starting to look like she could repeat what had seemed sure to be an unrepeatable run in Paris last year. On the other, you have a hard-hitting ex-junior No. 1 and ex-cinch for the Top 10 coming off the biggest win of her young yet undeniably disappointing career. As with Goerges, clay may help the offensive-minded, defensively challenged Russian by giving her just a little more time to catch up to the ball. But Schiavone knows these courts, and in her last match she looked like the gutsy, resourceful, snarling, finger-snapping, seize-the-moment competitor that she transformed herself into at Roland Garros in 2010.

Li Na vs. Victoria Azarenka (Head-to-head: Na leads 3-1)
These two faced off in the round of 16 in Melbourne in January, and Li Na was too good, blistering her backhand across the slow hard courts there for a routine 6-3, 6-3 win. Azarenka has been the better player since. She won in Key Biscayne and has been playing some of the best tennis on the WTA, while Na has mostly fumbled her way out of Australia. Na hits bigger, and in her last match she fought her way back from a first-set deficit against trendy Paris pick Petra Kvitova. Azarenka has built up a lot of confidence this year and is playing with a tough-skinned, fast-paced, buoyantly aggressive efficiency. She can’t knock the ball past you like Na, but she can build a rally and defend. Na on the right day is the better player, but the athletic Azarenka seems the more likely winner on clay.

Maria Sharapova vs. Andrea Petkovic (Head-to-head: Sharapova leads 2-1)
Did you know that the veteran Sharapova is only four months older than Petkovic, breakthrough story of the last year? That’s enough to remind you of how much more accomplished the famous Russian is than the upstart German. Petkovic won their meeting in Australia, and annoyed Sharapova with her celebration shuffle. So Sharapova got her revenge in the semis in Key Biscayne. Petkovic is still dancing, and still playing well, but this is starting to feel like Maria’s major—those happen every couple of years, you know (Wimby 2004, U.S. Open 2006, Melbourne 2008). Sharapova hits with more pace and, despite some very rough patches against Garcia and Radwanska, she’s been clutch in this event so far, clutch enough, anyway, to let her opponents self-destruct. Still, in 2011 Maria has had a tendency to play well for a time before throwing in an unmitigated bomb (Indian Wells semi, Key Biscayne final).

***

Rafael Nadal vs. Robin Soderling (Head-to-head: Nadal leads 5-2)
Wow, this one already. Nadal and Soderling split their two matches here the last two years. In the grand scheme, of course, all signs point to another Nadal win. He’s won their last two matches, after losing the previous two, and he ground Soderling into the red dust in last year’s Roland Garros final. But if you go by the form of the moment, Soderling has a chance. He’s been way under the radar so far, but he has advanced smoothly. Once again, clay gives him a little more time to haul off and bludgeon his ground strokes. Is Nadal struggling, is he getting better, is he up one day and down the next? No one knows, including Rafa, who says, rightly, that the future could go in a number of directions. Nadal seems to feel little pressure at the moment (he says he’s won the French five times and has no “obligation” to do it a sixth), but he’s also experiencing dips in his play, especially on his serve, that we’ve never seen before from him on clay. In the 2010 final, he was too consistent and speedy for Soderling—a dirt fortress. He hasn’t been as consistent this year so far. If Nadal hits short and moves poorly, the way he did in the first set and a half today, he could lose. If he opens up the court and moves with confidence, as he did for the second set and a half, he should be OK.

Gael Monfils vs. Roger Federer (Head-to-head: Federer leads 5-1)
These two have played twice at Roland Garros, with Federer dropping just one set in two victories. Monfils’ only win in their series came last year at the Paris Indoors, in a three-tiebreaker epic in which he saved five match points.

So Federer is starting with a major historical advantage—will that one extremely tight win really leave Monfils convinced that he can beat Federer again? I doubt it. Federer has been as good and smooth and efficient and in control as ever over the first week. From what I’ve seen, the shanks have dissipated and the movement is where it has always been. With the crowd pushing, I could see Monfils firing away to a first-set win, the way he did against Ferrer. But even then Monfils came down to earth rapidly after the initial burst of adrenalin. His best shots are just too difficult and low percentage to be automatically repeatable. Federer is adept at pushing Monfils back in their rallies. That’s not where the Frenchman is going to want to be on Tuesday. With all of his options, Federer is one guy who can make him pay for his poor court positioning.

***

Those are the six quarters we know. Novak Djokovic, always a step ahead this season, is already past his, thanks to a walkover, and into the semifinals—he’ll meet the winner of Federer-Monfils there. The other Top 4 seed, laggard Andy Murray, has yet to arrive in the quarters. He and Viktor Troicki will play a fifth set on Tueday for the (highly desirous) right to play Juan Ignacio Chela for a spot in the semifinals.

It’s been a somewhat strange ride so far. On the women’s side, it could get stranger, and we could crown a new and highly unexpected Slam champ—I’d love to see it. On the men’s side, we could get one step closer to the assumed three-man Armageddon between Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal. But you know what they say about making assumptions, right? You might say the same for predictions.

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Maria Sharapova said she’d need to be aggressive to win her fourth-round match against Agnieszka Radwanska. She was aggressive—almost too much so—but she won, though not without struggle.

The No. 7 seed came back from 1-4 in the first set and fought off five set points in the second to beat 12th-seeded Radwanska, 7-6 (4), 7-5, in exactly two hours. The win takes Sharapova to her first Grand Slam quarterfinal in two years and puts her three wins away from a career Grand Slam.

Heading in, Sharapova had won six of her seven matches with Radwanska, but her only loss came at their only Slam contest. Considering Radwanska would be Radwanska—for much of the first set she made Caroline Wozniacki look error-prone; the Pole made her first error all the way in the sixth game—the result was hardly a foregone conclusion. But we knew that this match would be on Sharapova’s racquet.

That was good news for Sharapova where her 47 winners were concerned. Not so much for the 44 errors. (Radwanska hit 13 winners and 12 errors.) Her groundstrokes were fierce but sometimes closer to the net and lines than necessary. Her serve, aided by an increasingly dependable toss, continues to look good. She double-faulted seven times, but also served seven aces. She didn’t play her best tennis, but she once again showed some great fight, especially from the middle of the second set on. Sharapova saved two set points down 3-5, eventually held, then won the next three games to win the second set and the match.

Radwanska brought the goods, but as is often the problem when she plays higher-ranked players, they weren’t good enough to trump the power of a player like Sharapova. Still, Radwanska’s trademark placement and touch, not to mention lovely movement, were on full display. You could see how she beat Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova to win the junior singles title here in 2006.

As the prospect of a career Slam becomes more real—and the question ‘How could Maria Sharapova win the French?’ becomes less rhetorical—it’ll be interesting to see how the long view of Sharapova’s career changes shape, how the present player fares in the inevitable comparisons to the past one, and especially to other current champs.

First, Sharapova versus past Sharapova. We know she had shoulder surgery and didn’t play a singles match from August 2008 to May 2009. She’s not the type to blame injury for loss of form, but she wasn’t the same player for a while after, especially where her serving was concerned. But if she equals or surpasses her best result here, a pre-surgery 2007 semifinal showing, on her worst surface, can we say she’s back?

Then, Sharapova versus other present champs. (Let’s leave Serena Williams out of it since she’s, well, the best.) Kim Clijsters has 18 more titles and one more Slam, but I sense many consider Sharapova the greater great. Would winning the career Slam confirm that for those folks and convince others? And where would a title put her in relation to Venus Williams, who currently has four more Slams but no career Slam? These comparisons aren’t necessarily fair—for one thing, Venus and Clijsters are presumably closer to the end of their careers than Sharapova—but they’re likely unavoidable.

Sharapova would say it’s too early for all this. And the first to agree might be her quarterfinal opponent, Andrea Petkovic, who easily beat Sharapova at the Australian Open. Which is to say, three more matches are so few but also so many.

—Bobby Chintapalli

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by Pete Bodo

PARIS—The irony of it all will not be lost on most of you. Rafael Nadal, No. 1 in the world, defending champion here at the French Open and a clay-court warrior who’s lost exactly one match in what is now his seventh year of competition on the red plains of Roland Garros, is said to be in a crisis.

It’s a crisis of “confidence.”

This wouldn’t be such an absurd idea if it were merely the press trying to whip up its usual mischief based on those two losses opn red clay to Novak Djokovic in recent weeks. But it appears that Nadal buys into the narrative, too. It shows in his pained or merely worried facial expressions on the court. It shows in those games that he now sometimes blows, allowing what once were 6-1 or 6-2 sets to become fat, 6-4 or even 7-5. And it shows in how sincerely he tackles the questions flung at him, questions with enough negative implications to make any proud player prickly or bellicose.

After a straight-sets win over Ivan Ljubicic today, Nadal said it was “a fantastic result to be in the quarterfinals. . . without losing a set” and in the next breath he volunteered: “(But) I think I still playing a little bit with too anxious for moments, so it happened today, no?”

It’s a tightrope Nadal is walking, trying to be honest and objective without further undermining his confidence with his admissions (just making the effort deserves an “A,” given how the relation of top players with the press generally ranges from suspicion-laden to downright adversarial). You could more easily extract a molar from the mouth of most tennis players than the admission, “I am not worthy.”

“Win this tournament again? ” Nadal asked, somewhat rhetorically. “No, seriously, I am not confident. I am not playing enough well to win this tournament at the (level) of today. That’s the true. The thing is you have to be realist, and today I’m not playing enough well to win this tournament. We will see after tomorrow if I am ready to play at this level. I going to try. . .”

If you’ve observed Nadal long enough, you probably know that his humility is neither intentionally self-effacing nor self-serving; it’s actually his lodestar. He’s no saint, but as far as appealing sources of motivation and perhaps even egotism go, it’s a good one. Humility has brought him awful far, and if nothing else it’s kept him remarkably free of the Big Three afflictions to which great players fall prey when they hit some rough sledding: petulance, paranoia and peevishness.

Still, there are glimmers of rebellion against the nature of the questions now being put to him, and the implications they carry. He offers gentle reminders and affirmations of his abilities and achievements. The end of the answer about his form, quoted above, was: “But I won four times already here, five times already here. I don’t have an obligation to win six. I going to try for sure.”

Or, consider this surprisingly philosophical meditation on the persistent use of the word “problem” in these deconstructions of Nadal’s psychic and physical state: “People talk a lot about the problems I have. That’s true. I’m not playing my best tennis, but, you know, people who want to find problems can always find them. The objective is to look beyond that. . .

“People should stop using the word ‘problem.’ We should try to find solutions and play with happiness, which is what I know. I know how to do this, being aggressive and intensive. I have nearly found this type of game again. I have positive thoughts, and next match is going to be important. If I don’t win the match, I’ll walk back home. But I’ll be happy, because I know I’ll have done everything I can so that I can fight until the end.”

This may sound suspiciously like the tennis equivalent of the plea for world peace, but it’s about the least antagonistic thing he could say, given how doggedly he’s peppered with questions about a real or imagined decline of confidence, or game. Almost every question asked of Nadal these days is either overtly or implicitly a criticism of his game, and often couched in a form that demands that he compare himiself to. . . himself.

I’m a little surprised that Rafa, a fisherman himself, would rise to some of this bait. When he was asked to compare his present form with the past—any old time in the past since he began winning this tournament—he appeared to blow off the query. But, surprisingly, he returned to it.

“Going to be long if I have to have all the comparisons. In 2006 I think I didn’t play well during all the tournament; in 2007, normal; 2008, I played fantastic, but I played fantastic especially quarterfinals, semifinals, and final. 2009 I think I played terrible all the tournament; 2010, so‑so. Much better semifinals and finals than previous matches. Very so‑so, in my opinion, no? This year, the second match was especially bad. First match wasn’t that bad, in my opinion. Second match was bad level. Third match was positive, I think.”

My colleague Ubaldo Scanagatta picked up on all this in today’s presser and opined that in his forty-plus years of covering tennis, he’d never seen a No. 1 player subjected to so much, well, grief, about how “badly” he’s playing while holding his position. Did Nadal find this surprising (read: irritating), Scanagatta wanted to know?

“No, for me that’s something fantastic. That’s true, no? All the day we are talking about I am playing very bad, but I am in quarterfinals. I play six finals in a row this year. I am having a very good year.  One player is doing better than me. That’s all.”

I never did get to pose a question, which would have been something like this: Are you aware of the irony in this situation, where Djovovic is playing Nadal to your Federer? Didn’t we recently go through something like this when Nadal emerged to establish himself as a rival to Federer? Weren’t you supposed to be in Federer’s head, instead of Djokovic being in yours?

The way Djokovic is playing, he brings a whole new order-of-intensity to a familiar struggle. Djokovic is coming on with all the force you expect from someone who was long oppressed. And Djokovic is making both Nadal and Federer reap the whirlwind.

In truth, Federer and Nadal both appear to be bearing up pretty well under this onslaught, and while Djokovic is indeed on an amazing run, it’s still a long year, a long career. Nobody really knows what tomorrow will bring, although we know what it will bring for Nadal. Another opporutnity to do what he’s always done best, a task in which his frenemy Federer has been what reformed drunks like to call an “enabler.”

“I’m a bit tired right now, frankly,” Rafa told his native press today. “But also, I feel good. I’m really happy. I have this desire to do things well. I would like to go through difficult moments and to overcome these obstacles. Sometimes things don’t unravel the way you want them to develop, but sometimes it’s necessary to go through these difficulties.

“I’ve reached the quarterfinals here at Roland Garros. It’s been six finals for me here. For the time being, I would say everything is okay. So your question is, How do I manage all this?  My answer is, I try and improve daily. I wake up very happy to practice and I’m really glad. So far things are going well. Of course there are some tiny obstacles I have to overcome, and I’ll do it. If I don’t do it, as I told you before, then I will try and improve next time I play another tournament. That’s the only solution I can think of.

“There aren’t that many options out there. You have to write a lot of papers on this, but tennis is a rather simple sport sometimes. Don’t try and split hairs, you know. This sport is not too much of a tactical sport sometimes. There aren’t that many explanations. If you play well, you have more options. You know what have to do to play well.  As I keep on saying, I’ll try.”

Of that, at least, we have no doubt.

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A roar erupted from the fans inside Court Philippe Chatrier when the scoreboard confirmed Gael Monfils’ win on Court Suzanne Lenglen, but streak silencer Robin Soderling soon pressed the mute button on Gilles Simon and the French faithful. The two-time French Open finalist stormed through the first two sets, then survived a late stumble to send Simon packing, 6-2, 6-3, 7-6 (5). The fifth-seeded Swede is the only man to beat Rafael Nadal at the Roland Garros, and the two will square off for the third consecutive year in Paris, with a semifinal spot on the line.

The 6’ 4” Soderling is not your classic clay-courter. He doesn’t construct points as much as he deconstructs them, swinging with the force of a demolition expert detonating baseline blasts. It’s a style that has produced explosive upsets the last two years; Soderling snapped Nadal’s 31-match French Open winning streak in 2009 and overwhelmed Roger Federer in the 2010 quarterfinals, stopping the defending champion’s record run of 23 consecutive Grand Slam semifinals.

Soderling has surrendered just one set in four matches—the second set of his first-round win over American lucky loser Ryan Harrison—and showed shrewd shot selection today against Simon. The Swede outweighs the slender Frenchman by nearly 40 pounds, but rather than relying on his immense power in resorting to grip-and-rip tennis, he played high-percentage, cross-court drives, drawing the inevitable short ball before pounding clean winners with the conviction of a man slamming shut the trunk of his car.

Simon opened the match with an ace, but Soderling won 16 of the next 18 points to surge out to a 4-0 lead. Slashing an inside-out forehand winner for a second set point, Soderling hit a service winner to seal the set in 31 minutes. Simon can also hit service winners—he owns a sneaky-fast first serve—but his second delivery offered little deception. Soderling broke twice in succession, the second with a bullet backhand up the line, to collect the second set.

The insular Simon is not as expressive as Monfils, nor does he engage the home crowd like his countryman. Throughout much of the first two sets, Simon spent time between points snarling at himself, frustrated because he couldn’t dent his bigger-hitting opponent’s defenses. The match appeared to be a mismatch when Soderling went up 4-1 in the third, but the fifth seed took treatment for blisters on his racquet hand during the changeover and his level dipped when play resumed.

A stubborn Simon saved three match points to force a tiebreaker, only to see Soderling slam a 136 mph ace as Simon whiffed on the return. It gave Soderling four more match points, and though Simon would save three of them, the Swede snapped off a backhand down the line to end it, screaming with such emotion that the veins on his neck were visibly bulging, while his eyes now look ahead to another match with reigning champion Nadal.

—Richard Pagliaro

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It didn’t feel like a fifth set at Roland Garros, especially one where a Frenchman was involved. There were two reasons for that. First, the Gael Monfils-David Ferrer fourth-rounder was in its second day, having been postponed yesterday with Monfils leading two sets to one, but trailing in the fourth: 6-4, 2-6, 7-5, 0-2. The match’s flow was reset, its momentum lost. But another momentum lived on, through the night and into the new day. Ferrer kept his break-of-serve advantage and rolled through the fourth set, 6-1, silencing the packed house inside Court Suzanne Lenglen.

Had Ferrer earned a break of serve in the opening game of the fifth set—which he had a chance to—this could have resembled an early-round, straight-setter on the women’s side: a two-set drubbing. But Monfils saved that break point, getting the crowd and himself back into the match. He held, and with the advantage of serving first in the final set, Monfils did well when holding the balls, running through his subsequent service games without much trouble. Until, of course, he had a chance to end this contest.

When Monfils broke serve in the fourth game, it didn’t look as if he would encounter much resistance; Ferrer had made no impression on the French favorite’s serve since that opening foray. But when Monfils led 40-15 when serving at 5-3, he put a forehand into net, then succumbed to a down-the-line forehand of Ferrer’s on the second match point. Soon we were back on serve. Now it felt like a fifth set.

With the scene set, the dramatics followed: at 6-5 to Monfils, Ferrer bungled a volley to go down match point for the third time, but another down-the-line forehand got him out of danger. Monfils escaped a perilous point of his own in the next game, saving a Ferrer break chance. Then, at 7-6 to Monfils, Ferrer quickly fell behind 0-40 after two errors and a Monfils passing shot. On the fourth point of the game, and Monfils’ fourth match point of the day, he slid into a forehand and struck another pass, curling the ball around Ferrer for the win. Celebration ensued, but it can’t last long, as Roger Federer awaits Monfils tomorrow.

—Ed McGrogan

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