Tomic outlasts and outwits Verdasco

TWO hours in and Bernard Tomic was on the wrong end of a tennis lesson.

Fernando Verdasco, the 22nd seed and a wily veteran of the pro tennis tour had him running from one side of the scorching court to the other, from baseline to net and back to the fence and back again.

Late in the second set of the first round match at the Australian Open, Verdasco stood waiting to serve as the teenager with the big raps bent over double trying to catch his breath.

“Take your time.”

Bernard Tomic was gone. Finished. Out of the championship.

Then, at 0-2 down and with barely the strength to wipe the sweat from his brow, he heard the crowd.

“There were some guys calling out for me. I could hear them,” Tomic said.

He doesn’t know what they said, but it worked.

“People do help when they scream out the right things,” he said.

Tomic, the 19-year-old boy who is “the man” in Australian tennis, dragged himself back onto the court and a couple of hours later it was Verdasco who was scurrying and fumbling and falling apart.

It took four hours and 11 minutes for Tomic to beat Verdasco, and at no time until the last point was there any certainty about the result.

Asked what had happened, Tomic responded as honestly as he could: “I don’t know.”

“The first set was very tough.

“I didn’t feel 100 per cent.

“I don’t know how I found the energy to lift.”

Turning to the crowd he gave them the credit.

“It was you,” he told them. “It wasn’t me.”

Tomic acknowledged the first two sets had been frustrating and painful.

He also revealed a cunning and guile few would have suspected when he said he’d been foxing in the third set.

“In the third set I pretended not to be there mentally,” he said.

“I had a feeling he thought I was going to go away so I eased off, seemed like I didn’t care.

“He thought he was going to win that third set, and when the right time came, I broke him.”

For all that, Monday’s match reminded Tomic what big-time tennis is about.

“Today wasn’t fun, it was torture,” he said.

Two days earlier Tomic had won a fairly serious exhibition match against the world No.8 Mardy Fish.

The success, added to his effort to make the quarter-finals at Wimbledon last year, had earned Tomic a world ranking of 38 and the mantle of Australia’s No.1 men’s player.

His latest effort proves that he deserves to be. - AAP