Well, it happened. Given his low seed (No. 6 after one player’s withdrawal), Rafal Nadal had a 25% chance of landing in Novak Djokovic’s quarter. Then, lo and behold, when the French Open draw came out Friday morning in Paris, its nine-time champion got exactly that, a potential quarterfinal with the current and dominating world No. 1.
Are you happy, French tennis officials (and tennis officials worldwide that would be similarly cowardly to enable a situation such as this)? Does an arbitrary, often unfair, point system that pays no attention to things such as opponent or quality of win or loss still seem like the best way to seed players at major events? Are you looking forward to the biggest match of your event being played in the early-evening on a Tuesday, waiting for an Ekaterina Makarova-Elina Svitolina match to finish, instead of on a glorious championship Sunday?
No one should be happy about this (except one man, who we’ll get to), not Nadal, who didn’t play well enough to hold his ranking and now has to reap the penalties, to Djokovic, who simply got a bad draw, to television broadcast partners who expect the top-two players in the event to meet in the finals, not the quarters, to Andy Murray, who got placed on the same side of the bracket and would get the Djokovic-Nadal winner and back to Djokovic and Nadal for having to duke it out with each other and then see the undefeated-on-clay Murray in the next round. It’s a joke.
One person who’s smiling on Friday? Roger Federer. Though he’s recently proved easy to beat early in Slams, he’s clear on the other side of the draw from the rest of the Big Four. There’s young Dominic Thiem to possibly worry about and the enigmatic Gael Monfils if the Frenchman can make it the the fourth round, but Federer should be able to get to the quarters where he’d meet fellow Swiss player Stan Wawrinka, who Federer owns with a 16-2 record. From there, a semifinal against Tomas Berdych or Kei Nishikori could await and then, quite realistically, Federer could be back in the French Open final for the first time in four years, calmly waiting for whichever player comes out of tennis’s first Group of Death and hoping they’re battle-scarred enough where he’d have an advantage to improbably win his second title in Roland Garros at age 33.
But, for a time, Federer will be an afterthought in Paris, as all eyes shift to the top quarter of the draw, where the all-time French Open champion and his 66-1 lifetime record at Roland Garros will likely face the world No. 1, reigning Australian Open champion and a player one French title away from a career Grand Slam in a match that will come about five days early — a final masquerading as a quarterfinal, all because everybody in charge was too spineless to do something about it.