By Charles Bricker
About one minute into Roger Federer’s post-match press conference, he was, at least in part, blaming his quarterfinal loss Wednesday at Wimbledon to Tomas Berdych on a couple of lingering injuries to his back and leg — a claim that seemed to leave Berdych incredulous.
“I don’t know if he’s just looking for some excuse after the match, or something like that,” Berdych said. He then quickly tried to soften the remark with a little winner’s diplomacy. “So maybe right now he’s getting some more troubles with the health. But, you know, it just happen today, so I didn’t know that. I just heard it first time right now.”
There’s an unwritten rule in professional tennis about blaming your losses on injury, especially when you haven’t had a trainer out in mid-match to work on some malady, so it was a little surprising to hear Federer raise the specter of injury inhibiting his game.
And he didn’t try to work this information in obliquely in the middle of his press briefing. Nor was he asked if he was hurt. He volunteered the information, almost immediately after he began answering questions.
Federer suggested that he was having difficulty with his back and that he has been “feeling bad the last two or three matches. “Well, when you’re hurting, it’s just a combination of many things,” he said. “You just don’t feel as comfortable. You can’t concentrate on each and every point because you do feel the pain sometimes. And, yeah, you tend to play different than the way you want to play.”
However, just two days earlier, after trouncing highly-rated Austrian Jurgen Melzer in the round of 16, Federer said: “My thigh was hurting a little bit, which already was the case in Halle (two weeks before Wimbledon). But, honestly, now I have no more problems. No more strapping. I’m happy I recovered that.”
That’s what he said, publicly: “Honestly, now I have no more problems.” Two days later, after losing to Berdych, he said he had been suffering thigh and back injuries for some time.
Berdych was right on point when he told reporters, in his still evolving English, that at the six-month point in the season, it’s normal for every player to have some kind of minor pain. If Federer really has some minor injury problems, he can’t possibly be the only player at Wimbledon who is fighting through some fitness difficulty.
What is surprising is to hear a player bring up an injury after a loss when there has been no outward indication, like a trainer coming on court.
The issue of injury also came up last Saturday with Rafael Nadal, who disclosed that he had a knee problem at the start of the clay court season. But, he said, “I don’t like to say nothing in that moment because when you lose, always looks like an excuse. But I can say now I had the problem after I played Monte Carlo with a little bit of pain on the knee.”
Nadal was explaining why he didn’t play Barcelona the next week. The explanation he gave at the time was “exhaustion.”
Charles Bricker can be reached at nflwriterr@aol.com