As I walked onto the court with my younger son, my first words to Bops was "Let's go Bops!". I made sure I shouted this out loudly to let him know that he has some live support in the stands. Everyone else was sitting around timidly like zombies, and I was trying to rouse the crowd to no avail.
I made sure I clapped loudly and yelled everytime he won a point, or served an ace. I would like to think it helped. Rarely have I witnessed such an enjoyable match.
Contrary to the reports, it was actually a very close, high-quality match, with Bofors serving and playing out of his mind. Saulnier was trying to mix up the pace very intelligently, but Bofors was so focused that he read all the pace changes correctly and put together a dazzling array of serves and groundies. Games went with serve till 3-3, when Bofors hit a dazzling running backhand pass that left Saulnier stranded at net. It was by far one of the best backhand down-the-line passing shots I have ever seen, bar none (and I've seen a lot of tennis over the years). AFter the serve break, it was a tense serving game where Bofors delivered on some critical inside out forehands to set up the put-away volley to finish out the set.
All this time, yours truly was shouting loudly at every point won by Bofors. Mr. Saulnier didnt like it; too bad, I felt.
Bofors broke early in the second set to take a 2-0 lead. I could sense that Bofors was slowing down a little bit with a few errors creeping in, but luckily he held himself together and was able to maintain his momentum and serve out the match. One wise yell that may have helped was "Now keep holding serve"! which I noticed was again not well received by Saulnier.
Now some technical points: Bofors has tremendous ground strokes, by far much more impressive than what we saw at the davis cup. we must NOT continue to hamper our players by making them play on grass when they can play so well on hard courts! His backhands were powerful, with heavy topspin and depth, constantly putting Saulnier on the defensive. His forehands were powerful weapons too today. He needs to get more aggressive on his volleying, his serving was top-10, world class that was of the same quality as Ljubicic whose match I watched following Bofors's match.
Can he give Ljubicic a hard time if he gets that far? Too early to tell, but if he can continue to play like he did last night, I felt that he can go all the way, and I told him so when I met him after the match.
In any case, I have seen great tennis from a fellow Indian, that really made my day and I look forward to Bofors' next match with great enthusiasm.
Kind Regards
"Prof" Krish Narayan
USPTA
