France looking for the next Noah
Allan Kelly
PARIS: French hopes of finally celebrating another male champion at Roland Garros have taken another big hit with the news that Gael Monfils is out due to injury.
Already optimism was not high on the home front that someone could step forward and play the tournament of his life, as Yannick Noah did 29 years ago, to win the tournament.Noah’s watershed win brought an end to 37 years without a Frenchman holding aloft the Coupe des Mousquetaires (Marcel Bernard won in 1946) and with Noah still in his prime, and the likes of Henri Leconte and Guy Forget coming through, the future looked bright.
But apart from Leconte’s run into the final in 1988, when he dismally lost in straight sets to Mats Wilander and was roundly jeered by the French fans, it has been a dismal picture.Still, with a new generation of talented French players emerging a few years back, hopes were revived that a home win would soon be achieved.
That has turned out not to be the case.Firstly there was the emergence of Rafael Nadal, widely seen as the greatest claycourt player of all time.The Spaniard has won the French Open a record-equalling six times since 2005 and the one year he did not, in 2009, it was Roger Federer who stepped forward to take the title.
Now, with world number one Novak Djokovic also more than capable of winning the only Grand Slam event to be played on clay, the chances of others prevailing are slim.Monfils did make it through to the semi-finals in 2008, when he gave Federer a good run for his money, but repeated injuries since then have limited his progress.
Top French hope this year will be world number five Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, but clay has never been his favourite surface and his comments in Rome last week sounded defeatist.“To be able to win at Roland Garros, first of all you have to have won a Masters Series tournament on this surface,” he told the French press. For the moment we (French players) are incapable of winning a Masters Series on any surface.”
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