A first round match between the 23rd seed John Isner of USA (see pic on the left) and unseeded Nicolas Mahut of France (pic on the right) at Wimbledon. The match was suspended on tuesday evening at two sets all. They resumed on Wednesday and played the final set for ..............hold your breath.................another 6 hours...........and the score stood 59-59 (tie break is not applied in the final set at Wimbledon) when the poor umpire thought it fit to put a temporary stop to the marathon and suspended play for the day. The match has broken all the records. It has already lasted 10 hours and is the longest match in official tennis history by a long mile. The next longest match lasted only 6 1/2 hours.Isner has served 98 aces and Mahut 95 (The next highest was 51 in a match). For 118 games the serve was not broken and both served brilliantly. The singles match that had the maximum number of games in a match stood at 112, and the final set alone of this match has had 118 games so far and it is still not finished. At 50-50, the score board operator didnt know what to do as there was no provision for beyond 50. He reverted to 0-0 and begged everyone to add 50 to each figure. The players, who could barely remain standing and were delirious, will continue the epic on the third day, thursday. And by the way, what was the score in the first four sets? Well, no one quite remembers!!!!The match moved even the mighty Federer who was in awe and had this to say " It's unfortunate these guys are going to be a little bit tired tomorrow... and the next day, the next week, the next month… It's absolutely amazing. It's a very special match. I hope some way it's going to end. know they're maybe not loving it. This is unheard of in our game. Normally there are breaks but John's barely moving but is still able to produce good serves. I don't know if I was crying or laughing, it was too much. I can relate to it to some little degree - but this is beyond anything."
"There's no way you can think about trying to describe something that's never happened before and will never happen again," says John McEnroe, who played a marathon last set (18-16) with Bjorn Borg three decades ago himself in another epic final, which I was fortunate enough to follow on BBC radio.
And what did the two gladiators had to say?
Mahut - "He's just a champ, we had to fight like we never did before. Someone has to win, we'll come back tomorrow and see. I mean, it's amazing, the crowd is just fantastic. Everyone wants to see the end, but we'll have to come back. We play for too long, I don't know how many hours."
Isner - "Nothing like this will ever happen again... ever. He's serving fantastic, I'm serving fantastic. That's really all there is to it. I'd like to see stats, the ace count. We both couldn't agree to play so they cancelled."
This is what sport is all about, and
it is Surreal
