We wake up and the miraculous happens. The not-an-Uber driver finds the phone in his car, and sees that there has been a call to it - from Chris, calling Bill after the alarm people had called him. The driver calls Chris (it's 2am now, sorry again Chris!) and Chris gets the driver's number and emails Bill with it! While we slept!
So in the morning we call the driver and arrange to rendezvous at Flushing Meadow where he picked us up the night before.
We read the paper in a cafe. Daniil Medvedev is the same age as our son Lachie. He looks so young.
What the NY Times said about yesterday's game.
What it said about Elina Svitolina. We will be watching Gael Monfils today.
Then we Uber to tennis around 11.30 am. Bill gets his phone back. We give the driver a good tip for his service (more than the ride the night before!) I have a quiet chuckle. I have lost my phone twice. He can lose his phone too. Not that it is a competition. But it is nice it is not me again.
Our first game today is Donna Vekic from Croatia v Belinda Bencic from Switzerland. Belinda Bencic won 7-6 6-3. I felt the game could have gone either way. These two are friends and hitting partners, though when they are on either end of a court, that all goes out the window, and they are competitors. This is Belinda.
This is Donna.
This is victorious Belinda.
The second game we watch is Matteo Berrettini from Italy v Gael Monfils from France. After reading yesterday's article I have my favourite. See if you can guess who? This game was rated the best game of the tournament to that stage, and it was definitely the best game we saw - 4 hours and won in a tiebreaker in the fifth set.
The highlights video below - Monfils, what a legend and wonderful role model even though he lost.
These were the stats. Have a look at Monfils and his double faults. If he could have served he might have won! I bet Elina will have something to say about that!
Then it was a short break to grab a bite to eat and watch Biana Andreescu from Canada v Elise Mertens from Belgium. This game completely changed in the middle. I thought Elise had this match in the bag after the first set. And then Bianca came back. When asked at the end "What changed?" she said "I talked very sternly to myself and told myself to pull finger." Bianca 15th seed defeated 25th seed Elise Mertens 3-6, 6-2, 6-3.
Elise below.
Bianca.
The happy winner.
We didn't watch Nadal's game. It was already late, we'd had a thriller during the day, we'd had a late night with the alarm drama, and we find Nadal's slow play harder to watch.
As you'll know, the winners in the finals were Bianca Andreescu and Rafa Nadal. Bianca beat Serena and Rafa beat Daniil.
I watched Rafa and Daniil in their epic 6 hour final on TV in Noosa later in the week. I had my favourite to win. If you guessed Medvedev you are right - but it won't be long before he wins a major I think.
This from Make It: ""Nadal, who won his first-ever Grand Slam title as a 19-year-old at the 2005 French Open, has experienced massive and sustained success for well over a decade even as he’s battled injuries that threatened his career at times. Two days before Nadal’s championship match on Sunday, the Spaniard was asked about the secret to his lasting success.
″[The] secret is probably the passion and the love for what you are doing,” Nadal told a crowd of fans who had just watched him defeat Italian tennis player Matteo Berrettini in the U.S. Open semifinals. “It’s impossible to have a successful and very long career if you really don’t love what you do,” Nadal added."
Bianca and Serena Williams.
From the US Open site: "Years ago, Bianca Andreescu wrote her name and the prize money for winning the US Open on a mock-up check. She was 16 at the time and harbored ambitions of reaching the pinnacle of her sport. The check served as motivation, driving a hope that one day she would get her hands on the real thing. On Saturday evening in New York, she did just that, defeating Serena Williams 6-3, 7-5 to become Canada's first ever Grand Slam singles champion.
"After I won the Orange Bowl back in 2015, a couple of months later I just felt like I could do really big things in this sport," Andreescu told CNN after her US Open victory. "So, I just grabbed a check and wrote the prize money of that year. But every year I kept increasing it because it kept changing. But I just kept visualizing that moment since that day."