This is going to be a tough tournament for French chair umpire Kader Nouni, who blew an enormous and embarrassing hole in John Isner’s second-round win over David Nalbandian match on Day 4 of the Aussie Open and who is not only getting booed by fans at the tournament but reviled on his own Facebook.
It wouldn’t be surprising if officials and the ATP decided to unseat him for the rest of the fortnight, but we’ll see how that plays out in the hours to come.
Meanwhile, before I get into a recap of how he singlehandedly crushed the life out of a great match with an utterly dumb refusal to allow a challenge, here’s a smattering of Facebook messages sent to his site:
* “I’m not fan of David Nalbandian, but . . . shame on you.”
* “You need to retire.”
* “Worst call ever.”
* “How much money do you get with your stupidity?”
Even his own countrymen got into it. “8/8 en balle de break dans un match de grand chelem. Service overrolle, et on accepte pas le challenge???? Are you serious?” asked Antoine Bronner with a lovely little English touch that put me in mind of John McEnroe.
Fabricio Villanueva simply wrote, “Burro,” which made me LMAO.
And on and on the messages went, with no one defending the 30-something umpire who has been described by others as “the French Barry White” and by himself as wanting to be “worshipped by adoring fans.”
Here’s the blow-by-blow at 8-8 in the fifth set, more than four hours into a tense match which Nalbandian looked close to winning as Isner began to suffer cramps in his right quadriceps muscle.
Big John was facing his third break point when he pounded a first serve down the T into the ad court. You could hear the immediate call of out, and then Nouni overruled and, because Nalbandian didn’t appear to have a play on the ball, awarded the point outright. No replay.
OK, no problem at this point, though Nalbandian looked surprised. And so did Isner, for that matter, which wasn’t surprising because John had a straight-line look at the serve. He could see it was out and several TV replays showed it was, indeed, wide of the center service line. It was, for starters, a bad overrule.
So, Nalby walked over to look for some tell-tale yellow fuzz on the hardcourt and decided that, yes, it was wide. He raised a finger, the sign indicating a challenge, and walked back to the baseline. When he turned around, Nouni announced “deuce,” and both players looked a bit stunned.
Nalbandian walked over to the umpire to make it clear that he was challenging, and that’s when he was told “you can’t challenge because you took too long.”
Too long? Huh? I’m looking at this and thinking, “This can’t be real.” This was not one of those deals where the player goes over to look for a mark on the court, circles around it, puts his fingers to his chin as if to contemplate and then challenges. It was like one-two-three. Walk over to the mark, instantly decide to challenge, raise your hand and bingo.
For the record, there is no hard and fast rule on the number of seconds players have to challenge. It’s purely umpire discretion, and most of these guys are savvy enough to know when a player is gaming the system and when a player is exercising sportsmanship under the rules.
And the umpire absolutely has to factor in some perspective. These men had been out there over four hours and it’s 8-8 in the fifth set. It’s a wonderful match with Isner’s big serve (43 aces) against Nalby’s super ground game (67 winners, 33 unforced errors).
There was no tension between the players whatever. In fact, a couple points earlier, Nalby had held up his racket, as if to say sorry on a cross-court return that luckily clipped the sideline for a point. Everything was beautiful. The weather. The match. The ambiance.
And then Nouni destroyed this match.
Charles Bricker can be reached at nflwriterr@aol.com