When he entered the Future tournament in Montauban ($25,000), last week, Simon Reveniau (ATP 1569) was the victim of a mishap that he will remember for a long time.
The 26-year-old Frenchman was disqualified after winning the first set 7-6 and trailing 4-3 in the second (official score posted: 6-3). But what could he have done to cause the match to end before the 3rd set even started? Reveniau simply no longer had a racket to play with.
“I attacked the match with three rackets. They were like new. The first string that I had used for some training broke first, in the second set, at 3-3. I wasn’t worried, I still had two more,” the Frenchman told the Ouest-France newspaper.
After losing his serve everything went very quickly in the eighth game. His second racket broke on the first point, and the strings of the third gave up the ghost immediately, still at 4-3.
Simon Reveniau no longer had operational ropes. But why didn’t he call on someone off the court? “That’s what the referee advised me. But it was around midday, there weren’t many people there. And, admittedly, I panicked when I was taken by surprise. I was in shock. Without any apparent solution,” he continues in Ouest-France.
Finally, the referee applied the rules and the Frenchman, who still cannot explain why his strings broke in series, was disqualified. “With this story, I learned one thing: there are two kinds of disqualification, the one that is caused when a player violates the code of conduct, and the less serious one that can be caused by an equipment problem, with a logo that is too big for example or a missing racket, therefore.”
Second zone players, although already ranked in the ATP, do not really have the staff that allows them to react in the event of a hard blow. But following his singles misadventure, Reveniau found some material, since he played the doubles in the afternoon with Nicolas Colne, his… opponent of the morning.
