The first round was a test. This was for real. Maria Sharapova found herself in a genuine battle for survival against a tough opponent  in the second round at the French Open here today and came through with the shoulder in one piece and  another victory to boost her confidence.

 The score against Nadia Petrova, a former world No. 3, was 6-2, 1-6, 8-6 and Sharapova had to battle back from 2-4 down in the final set. 

“I think it was a great match where I had to fight my way through many, many challenges and I did,” Sharapova said. “I thought I served well. It was actually one of the things I did best in the match. It was important to get a high percentage of first serves; to take control of the points. Nadia is a very aggressive player and she likes to get you on the run.”

 The fact that the serve worked so well for Maria was a huge relief. And, even if she had lost, coach Michael Joyce and agent Max Eisenbud, watching anxiously from the players’ enclosure, would have been satisfied just because the shoulder which has kept Sharapova out of the game for over a year, was holding up to the huge demands placed on it. That, for them, was the crucial test. Fighting back to win against such an experienced opponent, was just icing on the cake.

 No one should underestimate just how long a road back to a Grand Slam championship it has been for the former world No. 1. Maria admitted that last summer had been really tough for her because she had been looking forward so much to playing in the Olympics and the US Open.

“It was so disappointing, I made a conscious effort not to watch any of it,” she said. “But at the beginning of this year, it didn’t bother me at all. It actually motivated me more than anything. You know, I’d be in my hotel room in Pheonix and it would be like 11 p.m. and I’d watch a match and I’d be so motivated from the girls playing that I’d go to the gym. It was dark outside but I’d go to the gym just to work out. Little things…but it was more motivating than anything.”

 The motivation is real and now one can safely say so is the return of Maria Sharapova. Providing there are no after effects from her tough duel with Petrova, she should be ready to move on towards the last sixteen when she meets a qualifier from Kazhakstan, Yaroslava Shvedova.

 Meanwhile, the defending champion Ana Ivanovic who has been experiencing a different set of problems during the past twelve months, seems to be slowly re-discovering her game and her confidence. She obviously enjoys having Craig Cardon, who once worked with Martina Navratilova, with her full time and her passage through to the third round was more of a re-affirmation of her status than anything more serious. She beat Tamarine Tanasurgan, the very experienced Thai, 6-1, 6-2 with the kind of ease one would expect from a title holder. Ana will face sterner tests in the next few days but is starting to look more capable of dealing with them.

In men’s action world No. 3 Andy Murray came out the right end of an intriguing battle on the Philippe Chatrier Stadium Court against  Potito Starace but not before the Italian had appeared to be on the brink of creating a major upset. Everything seemed normal when Murray won the first set in routine fashion 6-3 but then he was suddenly in trouble at the start of the second, dropping serve in the opening game as his first serve deserted him and Starace began to move about court with greater freedom and inject a lot more invention into his play.

Three times he caught Murray leaden footed with brilliantly disguised drop shots and before the Scot knew which way the wind was blowing — many different directions, in fact, as it swirled around the big arena — the set was gone 6-2. But worse was to come for Murray. The second set had been about Starace upping the level of his game in impressive fashion but, at the start of the third, Murray’s own game started to shred as volleys went into the net and forehands flew long. At 5-1 to Starace, Murray was facing the unhappy prospect of having to claw his way back from two sets to one down against an opponent who was bursting with confidence on his favorite surface.

But Murray saved a set point at 1-5 and, having broken, came up with a brilliant pass down the line to save another at 3-5. A typically acute angle on a cross court forehand got the blood flowing through Murray’s veins again and, out of nowhere, he started to play like a world No. 3. 

“Obviously I was frustrated,” Murray said.  “I was playing very well and then I let him back in the match. I struggled a bit with my balance (he fell headlong on the clay at one point) and he played a lot of good drop shots. But then I started going for my shots again and managed to turn it around by playing a bit more aggressive.”

As soon as those set points were saved the psychological balance of the contest took an enormous swing. Starace has failed to win more than two consecutive matches all year. He is used to losing. Murray is used to winning. The difference made all the difference and poor Potito saw all his great work unravel as his opponent snatched the third set from his grasp and rolled through the fourth 6-4.

 All part of the learning process on clay for a player who has the talent and the determination to conquer this surface. Murray on clay is still a work in progress.

On this day, May 9^th, ninety-four years ago, a special kind of champion, a special kind of man, was killed in the trenches of World War One at Neuve Chapelle.

It may seem unfair to pick out one person from that day of infamy – a day that saw 11,000 British and Canadian soldiers lose their lives. Yes, that’s right – eleven thousand. I know there was a war going on and pig-headed generals were ordering men into the path of death but that figure tends to put a different perspective on Nine Eleven. It was a bad day – but only one of many, many more.

Even so Captain Anthony Wilding deserves to be selected as a posthumous standard-bearer for all those who lost their lives May 9^th, 1915  – not just because he was an extraordinary sportsman who won Wimbledon four consecutive years; not just because he helped Norman Brookes win the Davis Cup four times under the combined Australasian flag; not just because he was a champion motor-cycle racer in an age that was still coming to terms with rapid locomotion; not because he took athletic training to previously unheard of levels and had the girls swooning when they watched him compete.

No, Tony Wilding deserves to be remembered for who he was as a human being. He was, from every account I have managed to unearth, a very rare human being. There were many great sporting figures in the Edwardian era but the names of most have faded into history. The name of Wilding refuses to die. That is not only true in his native New Zealand where an actor was moved, just a few years ago, to put on a one man show of his life and toured with it around the country. It was true in Boston where, the last time I visited the Longwood Cricket Club, his portrait hung on the wall of the member’s lounge. “I found it in the basement,” a lady committee member told me. “I felt that would never do. I said we must have Tony in the lounge.”

She spoke as if she knew him but was not old enough to have done so. In Holland, a group of historians went on a pilgrimage to find his grave in Flanders and, having done so, enacted a little ceremony, standing over it with tennis rackets raised. On this day, in the midst of the war 94 years ago, news of Wilding’s death reached the House of Commons where his friend, Arthur Balfour, the former Prime Minister who used to play doubles with him, was particularly saddened. Over at the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, the First Sea Lord to whom Wilding had turned when asking for a commission in the Royal Marines, also took the news hard.

This son of a British-born lawyer from Christchurch on South Island had returned to his father’s homeland to study at Cambridge and began to move in the higher echelons of British society with an easy, almost diffident charm that drew men and women to him in equal measure. He drank sparingly; never smoked and willingly played tennis at house parties with people who could barely hold a racket.

He also fell in love with one of the beauties of the age, an American actress called Maxine Elliott who acted in the West End as well as owning her own theatre in Manhattan. Maxine was at least ten years his senior, a fact that may have interfered with any prospects of marriage.

It was typical of Wilding that he should argue against the Challenge Round concept which was used at Wimbledon prior to World War One – the system by which the reigning champion waited for a challenger to play through the draw to meet him so that he was only required to play one match. Although he was benefitting from it, Wilding thought it unfair and told the All England Club committee as much. It was only after his death that it was changed.

It was also typical that he should volunteer for active service. As a New Zealander he would not necessarily have been asked to enlist but he felt it was his duty to do so after living in Britain for a number of years.

So it came to pass that he would finally lose his Wimbledon crown to his great friend and Davis Cup comrade, Norman Brookes in July 1914 and then sail to the United States to play a Davis Cup Zone Final against Germany in Pittsburgh on the weekend that war was declared. Ironically the two German players, Otto Froitzheim and Oskar Kreuzer, were apprehended in mid-Atlantic on the way home and spent the war safely as POW’s. Wilding was not so fortunate.

Wilding eventually played his very last competitive match on the grass court that still exists in front of the clubhouse at the West Side Tennis Club at Forest Hills. With Australasia having progressed to the final against the USA, that was against Maurice McLoughlin, the man dubbed The Californian Comet whom he had beaten in their much-hyped Wimbledon final of 1913.  He lost this time but Australasia had already won the final by that stage as a result of  Wilding beating Richard Williams in the first rubber and then teaming with Brookes to take the doubles against Williams and Thomas Bundy. Brookes had clinched the decider against Williams.

Having returned to England, Wilding was soon dispatched to the front and spent the early part of May 9^th the following year directing his artillery guns in support of the British infantry.  He had been at the front for many months by this time but he knew the battle for  Aubers Ridge would be the biggest and most dangerous he would be involved in. He wrote to his mother in New Zealand the day before, telling her of his hopes and fears and sense of fulfillment at finally having been handed an onerous but crucial task.

By about 4.30 pm, Wilding called a halt to the firing for his battery and chatted with a fellow officer who also happened to be a good tennis player before deciding to take some rest. The Germans shells were still coming in and Wilding was warned that the dug he was about enter was likely to be more dangerous than the trench itself as it was in the line of fire.  But he just laughed and there was laughter, too, to be heard in the dugout as Tony chatted with three comrades seconds before the shell hit. He died instantly.

As rescuers rummaged through the wreckage they found a gold cigarette holder, given to Wilding by his friend and doubles partner Craig Biddle of Philadelphia after they had played together on the Riviera the summer before. As I mentioned Wilding didn’t smoke but it was customary in those days for gentleman to carry cigarettes to offer friends.

Telegrams of condolence flooded in from all over the world and Biddle was one of those who wrote of Wilding’s death in a letter to a friend. “I knew him well,” Biddle wrote. “And loved him. He was a big character and a strong one, never, as I recall, small in any way. He said what he thought, usually, never sulked or got peevish over small things and he had the soundest, most well balanced mind I have been in contact with…….”

Wilding’s immediate commanding officer, Lt Commander Chilcote of the Royal Navy Air Service, wrote in a similar vein. “I had learned to love him as few men love each other. My admiration for him was unbounded and I fear it will never be my good fortune during the remainder of my travels through this world to meet another friend with such a nature as his. I always felt he was an example to his fellow men in everything. God rest his great soul.”

They knew how to express themselves in those Edwardian times. More concisely, I suppose, you could say that Anthony Wilding was a hero.

What might be described as a confluence of conflicting forces spelt ultimate disaster for the United States Junior Fed Cup team in the North/Central and Caribbean Qualifying competition after an extraordinary weekend of tennis played out in an intense atmosphere here at the Evert Academy as well as the Boca West Country Club.

            On Sunday afternoon, the scenario had boiled down to this: Mexico had to beat Canada in the last round robin tie to give the United States the chance of making the Junior Fed Cup finals which will be played in Mexico at the end of September. Mexico lost two rubbers to one when Eugenie Bouchard and Marianne Jodain won the pivotal rubber for Canada 6-1, 7-6 and so the American girls are out. Why?

Because, with Mexico guaranteed a place as the host country, only one other team from the four nation group could go through and, as Canada had beaten the States on Friday 2-1, the US needed to have the Canadians beaten to have a chance. Even then it would have come down to matches, and even games, won and lost.

            Next question: How did the States lose to Canada? Actually by having two rubbers defaulted. And thereby hangs the tale. While the Junior Davis Cup and Junior Fed Cup as well as the ITF World Junior Team Competition was being played on clay at the Evert Academy, it was decided to play the American qualifying for a wild card place in the French Open over at the splendid Boca West facility which is located about twelve minutes drive away down Glades Road. Without the benefit of hindsight and that great intangible, Murphy’s Law, this would not have seemed a particularly dangerous thing to do. None of the men in the French Open qualifying were involved in the Junior Davis Cup team (John Isner came through to book his spot at Roland Garros) and if that was not quite true of the girls well….the venues were close by; the two officiating teams were working closely together and the sun was shining and…..and…..

            But no matter what the sun was doing outside, in the referee’s office at Evert’s this little black cloud appeared out of nowhere and proceeded to get bigger. Late on Thursday night, with matches due to start at 10:00 am next morning, one member of the US team, Lauren Herring, received a doctor’s report advising her not to play because of a slight irregularity on a blood test. Bad luck for Lauren but, no worries as they say in Melbourne, Nicole Gibbs, a 15-year-old who trains at Carson in Los Angeles, could play the second singles and then the doubles with Esther Goldfeld. Well….maybe.

            Gibbs, unlike everyone else playing in the Junior Fed Cup, WAS involved in the qualifying for Roland Garros. Not only that but she was due on court at about the time the US were scheduled to play their second match against Canada. A few worries there, but no real problem, surely, because even if Nicole had to default the second singles she would have time to race back and play the doubles and, with Goldfeld taking care of Marianne Jodain in the opening rubber, the US could still win 2-1.

            So, as Gibbs set about the onerous task of trying to beat Sloane Stephens, an African American of powerful build and huge promise, the US reluctantly handed Canada the second rubber on a default after the fifteen minute time lapse had been used up. I was at Boca West at this time, watching both semifinal qualifying matches with Patrick McEnroe and we spoke about Stephens’ potential as she took charge of her match against Gibbs and moved to a one set lead with a break in the second. She was having to work for it, mind you, because Gibbs is one of those players who gets a million balls back and never gives up on a seemingly lost cause. Rafa Nadal would be proud of her.   Nevertheless her chances of turning this match around seemed minimal and, with half an hour allowed under ITF rules between the second singles and doubles plus the fifteen minutes grace period over at Evert’s everything seemed under control. But old Murphy was lurking around up there somewhere and, with a rub of his Irish genie, he worked his worse magic. Something went in Stephens’ back. Nothing too serious, certainly not serious enough for her to quit because she does not look like a girl who would be inclined to do that. But serious enough to let Gibbs back in the match. More rallies came and went and the clock was ticking. Officials were staring at the watches and talking urgently into cell phones. Gibbs, doing what you must always do, even in fraught circumstances like this, concentrated first and foremost on the task in hand. She had walked on court with a match to win and she was not about to walk away from it. To their credit none of the USTA officials present suggested that she do so. Sure enough Gibbs won the second set from a break down and began an ultimately successful assault on the third. But, hard as she tried, she couldn’t quite finish quickly enough. Bundled into a car within seconds after closing it out 3-6, 7-6, 6-4, Nicole was half way down Glades Road when the call came through. Too late. Match defaulted. The US lose.

            Just to complete her nightmare weekend, Gibbs went back to Boca West the following day and, playing her heart out once more, came up short by 6-3, 7-6 against Lauren Embree, the Eddie Herr winner in Miami last December, and so lost her chance of going to Paris. No Mexico; no France; unable to help your team, what is a girl supposed to do? Turn the page Nicole. It wasn’t your fault and rewards for trying as hard as you do will arrive soon enough.

            The rest of the weekend was just an exercise in frustration for captain Roger Smith’s team. Lauren Herring, given the doctor’s OK, was in action on Saturday, winning her singles against Renata Zarazua of Mexico and then wrapping up a 3-0 win in the doubles with Esther Goldfeld. On Sunday, Gibbs re-joined the team to help it demolish the Bahamas, losing only four games in three matches. But when Mexico couldn’t handle Canada, it all came to naught.

            In retrospect it was no one’s fault although doubling up on competitions on the same weekend will probably be avoided in the future. Otherwise Murphy will be back in business.

            For the American boys it was plain sailing. Led by Jeremy Efferding and Shane Vinsant with Dennis Mkrtchian playing doubles, they swept Mexico and Canada 3-0 and then, on Sunday, defeated a Guatamalan team that seemed to be rich in talent but lacking in know-how.

            For anyone who enjoys seeing where the next generation is coming from, the talent on view at Evert’s these past few days would have been exciting even without the drama. It was evident from the little – frequently consoling – tete a tets with young players in corners of the player lounge or behind some courts, that coaches take their jobs very seriously, as they need to. The kids looked as if they were having fun but no one needs to tell them what kind of competitive world they are headed for and the dedication required would put the average teenager to shame.

            I was interested to see that the USTA had sent half a dozen boys over to Barcelona for a six week immersion on European clay and that they had returned, wearier, wiser but generally in one piece. They will certainly be better tennis players and better informed young men as a result of that European experience.

            By the end of this week I will be heading in that direction myself; first to Madrid where Ion Tiriac and the City of Madrid are about to unveil the newest and boldest addition to the sport’s infrastructure – the Caja Majica. Having seen it half built, I can assure you that it is a magic box and all we can hope for is some magic tennis and that each of the three sliding roofs over the three main courts open and close when instructed.

            Which reminds me of the best answer to a silly question at a recent press conference. At Wimbledon a couple of weeks ago, All England Club chairman Tim Phillips was showing off the splendid looking semi-transparent roof over the Centre Court. “It will take about eight to ten minutes to close when you push the button and another 20 to 30 minutes for the air management system to create the correct conditions for play,” Phillips explained.

            “Who gets to push the button?” someone asked.

            “The button pusher,” Phillips shot back.

            They tend to have most of the answers at Wimbledon.