Someone shoot me, please

I asked last night to be shot after the crappy loss by a certain Habs but then I decided to wait to be shot until after Federer played. Well, he played and lost 6-4, 6-7(3), 5-7, so shoot me right now please. After winning the first set, Federer went down fairly early in the second. By the time I tuned in it was 5-2 on Federer's serve. Thankfully Federer broke serve a couple of times (Murray apparently had temporary amnesia) to take it to a tie break but he eventually lost that and subsequently there was the beginning of the end of the match. I missed the tie-break entirely because my dog needed to be walked, but judging by the many, many errors from Roger, I'm actually surprised he held on as long as he did. I think if he was a normal person, he would have pulled out of the competition before. His back was clearly giving him a lot of trouble and I have no idea how you can even focus with all that pain. He definitely put in a good effort, probably better than anyone else in that type of situation (try that game in the last set when Murray was up 5-4 and it went to 10 deuces before Federer sent it to 5-5). Ultimately the errors killed him and basically handed the match to Murray at the end. This is obvsiously quite tragic for everyone who doesn't want Murray to win but hardly unexpected. Federer needs to go and take a nice long vacation, recover, and come back in January and beat everyone. again I honestly don't believe "his time is up" like people keep saying (dude, you would think that he's going to die by the way everyone is talking) and I'm fairly confident that he can maintain his spot in the top 2 next year if 1) he doesn't get sick 2) his back doesn't give him problems.

As for Murray...I don't know what Murray's excuse for doing badly was. He made almost as many errors as Federer. He came out completely flat today and he is very lucky that Federer just so happened to be in worse shape. And now Murray's going to win the stupid thing... unless Djokovic can remember how to play brilliant tennis... which he hasn't just yet....*goes off to find a Serbian flag* you're my only hope right now, Novak....!

More whining about tennis set to come up in the near future....

Near Future aka later at night: Okay, now that I've had time to be depressed about real unrelated issues and have been able to put things into perspective, here is how I see the semis going.

Murray vs. Davydenko. In theory this should be a no contest. Yes, Davydenko can play well. He's been making some very nice shots this week and if he can be consistant than he can at least give Murray a run for his money (which if Murray wins the cup thing, will be a lot of money) if not more. If he can make those nice Federer-type of shots then he has a chance. The thing is, Murray is a better player. In theory anyway. He's been doing his homework on his opponents and it's been working so far (granted Nadal and Federer have not been playing their best tennis since the US open but that's slightly beside the point). I have no doubt that Murray's already got a plot worked out. The one issue here though would have be how tired Murray will be. As I said before, he did not play brilliantly against Federer and he looked downright exhausted by the end (then again, Murray always looks more wiped out than he actually is but I think this time it was real). Davydenko has had a day to rest while Murray had a late match against Federer so we will have to see just how much that took out of him. I would still like to declare Murray the favorite though *wails*

Djokovic vs. Simon. Again, in theory this should be a no contest in Djokovic's favor. Simon has shown that he can be good. His brilliant showing in Madrid against Nadal proves that if he really wants it he can be a very dangerous player. On paper however, you would think that Djokovic would have a huge edge, being the Australian Open champion and the world no 3. The thing is, Djokovic hasn't won a title since May. I've seen him all summer, and except for his showing at the US Open, in which he kind of bombed out against Federer, he hasn't been doing particularly well. I haven't got to see him at Shanghai (thank you Canada for not really broadcasting the last tennis tournament of the year!) so I don't really know exactly how he's been doing, but he has to be feeling confident with how he's done to the semis in Shanghai. Hopefully he's got some type of rhythm going again and he can come out like the world no 3 that he's supposed to be.

On a completely different random note: Apparently the Tampa Bay Lightning have fired their coach, Barry Melrose. After having only coached 16 games, he fired today and is to be replaced by their assistant coach. I'm not completely surprised but I'm not sure why anyone thought that they were magically going to go from 30 to 1 in the space of 16 games. Yes, you got new owners, new managment, new players, and the top draft pick this year, but seriously.... did you honestly think that things were going to go really well this soon? I don't know anything about Melrose and what type of coach he is (although I have to wonder why a team that needed to change things around for the better picked a guy who hadn't coached in 13 years), but I really hope that they don't think things will immediately change right now. Oh well. We'll see. I've got a certain other team's issues to worry about, yeah?