Mornin'. After Varvara Lepchenko's big win over recent Roland Garros champion Francesca Schiavone yesterday, the sky seems to be the limit for young U.S. players. Is Sloane Stephens also capable of pulling off an upset of a Grand Slam champion? Well find out when she meets Slammin' Sammy Stosur.

That's the most intriguing match of the day for me, although maybe I ought to keep my own counsel. What was that I said about the entertainment potential of yesterday's clash between David Ferrer and Mikhail Youzhny? Sorri! Thankfully, Mikhail didn't do that Youzhy Racquet salute again (you know, the one where he opens a gash on his forehead by banging his racquet on it) and settled for just writing his (misspelled) apology into the clay. Thankfully, Kaia Kanepi more than made up for what that Ferrer win lacked in drama. Enjoy the tennis, everyone! 

- Pete

by Pete Bodo

The last time Sloane Stephens made some serious noise at a tournament, she told the press she was hoping to get a car. After her win yesterday over Mathilde Johansson, she admitted that the car thing never happened. She mentioned gas prices as part of the reason, whereupon a Dutch reporter invited her to Holland, which is a little surprising, given the still astronomical difference in prices between the U.S. and Europe. I suppose the fella meant that Holland is so small you can get from one end to the other in the time it takes Rafael Nadal to prepare to serve again after a point. Anyway, Stephens answered him:

I know. I was like, okay, so you have to do that, so you have to do the gas and everything. Then you have to take it to get like serviced or whatever and oil changes and this and that. And then my mom has a big car, and me and my brother go a lot of places when I'm home. So we'll drive like a full tank in a couple of days. One day we went, and it was $100 to fill up the car. I was like, You have got to be joking me. This is insane. So after that, I was like, it's okay. I don't want a car. That's fine. She waited too long, and then I found out all the stuff about the car, and I was like, forget it.

Stephens plays Sam Stosur in the fourth round on Sunday.

—Maria Sharapova, sports psychologist? The No. 2 seed at Roland Garros plays Klara Zakopalova next. After her last win, she was asked how she keeps from "imploding" or "falling apart" when she gets a case of the nerves. She revealed that she pretty muchtakes an "embrace the moment" tack.

I don't think you avoid it. I don't think it's something you can avoid. If you feel tension and you feel nerves, you're human to feel it. I think it's how you actually deal with them and how you cooperate, if you let them get to you. You know, sometimes you're in the moment and you're able to zone in, and sometimes you think a little bit too much, and it gets overwhelming out there.

But, I mean, pressure and nerves are—they are always going to be there. That's part of the game. If you don't feel a little bit of something in certain situations, then it's tough to kind of raise the level. Because when you have those nerves, you feel like you have to come up with something. At that point it's either you can or you can't.

Spoken like someone who resides in the "can" camp most of the time, right? When pressed further ("but what happens when it's a lot of nerves") she turned realist:

"Maybe wait until next time when it doesn't get so bad." She smiled. "I don't know. I mean, your options at that point are pretty limited. Maybe there is a magic pill for it. I don't know. I don't think there is."

—A journalist asked Roger Federer, who will play lucky loser David Goffin of Belgium for a place in the quarterfinals, what he would say if he learned (as is the case) that he was Goffin's idol (the 21-year-old Goffin has admitted that his room at home was plastered with Federer photos and posters). Federer replied honestly, with no false modesty.

"Not the first time it happens." Everyone laughed. "It's strange; I tell you that. It's weird. It's strange. It's everything you can imagine. I'm happy to hear it, though. So it's a big match obviously for him, and for me, too. It is a fourth round of a Grand Slam, after all, here in Paris where I know the Belgians, they like coming here and supporting their players like Justine and Kim in the past. I expect some Belgian fans to be there, too. Yeah, it's gonna be unusual match for me, knowing that now. So thanks for that."

Somehow, I think Federer will be able to handle that situation. . . 

—Svetlana Kuznetsova knocked off No. 3 seed Agnieszka Radwanska, and she's got a winnable match with surprising Italian Sara Errani, who specializes in defense and consistency. That would play right into the hands of the "new" Sveta. The champ here in 2009, Kuznetsova made a few allusions during her last presser to changes she's made in her approach to the game. When asked to elaborate, Kuznetsova said:

"Well, I try to play more forehands, I try to dictate, I play more speed. This is the game I was playing when I won U.S. Open and I won the French Open, when I won Miami. And start to be very ordinate on the court in my game. Not to play some—the tennis that other girls play and other girls like. I have some advantages which I have not been using.

"Coming back, for example, to Moscow to train, it was right thing for me, to my soul, to my feelings inside, but changing my tennis from Spanish ways to another way, that was wrong for me, my opinion. I had great coaches, everybody I appreciate a lot, and they brought a lot to me, but I need something else. I need a little bit back, my spin game."

I take this to mean that her heart is in Russia, and her body needs to be there too. But when it comes to her game, she needs to be more Nadal than Youzhny.

—I've noticed that a number of questions on the transcripts are now prefaced by, "This is a question from fans. . ."  I assume that the ink-stained wretches in question are busy working on the "social media" front. Anyway, one of them used the cover of fan interest to ask Tomas Berdych, who has a big match coming up with Juan Martin del Potro, if he was "jealous" when he sees his countryman Ivan Lendl sitting in rival Andy Murray's guest box. Berdych replied:

"Definitely not. I mean, I have no reason to be. I would say that maybe even the other side, it's even bigger challenge that I can see him (sitting) on the other side, and it's probably maybe not only kind of fight with Andy on court, but, you know, it's something—well, it's maybe just a small thing. No, I mean, definitely not jealous. Actually, it was nice to, you know, have a good match with him (Andy) in Monte Carlo and I was the one who won. Yeah."

I think Berdych meant that he gets some motivation out of the situation; you don't really impress a hard case like Lendl by losing to his protege, two-three-and-one. In that sense, Lendl's presence in a rival's box is a good thing.

—Sam Stosur is relieved to be in the second week of a major again (Sunday used to be part of the first week, but with the Sunday start now, who knows?), and has a pretty good opportunity to advance over ingenue Sloane Stephens. She was asked how she "sorts out" or "reconciles" her poor start to the year now that she's playing well. Stosur explained: 

"Yeah, I think the thing is it's probably not really too much about the tennis. I think if you just made it about hitting the ball, these are the lines and you play, then we'd all be perfect every single day, and you'd have lots of people playing great. But, unfortunately, you know, other things come into it. . . I didn't play very well throughout January, and the Australian Open was quite a disaster. But then once I left, I kind of forgot about it and realized that the world didn't end, it's not the end of the world, there's still nine months of tennis to play for the year and things can turn around. So I think if you really keep it in the big picture like that, you can turn things around."

—As I wrote above, David Goffin plays Roger Federer. Goffin said his aim was to just go out, go for his shots, have some fun. He was asked point-blank: "Do you have a chance?" He replied:

If I say yes I will sound arrogant; if I say no you'll say I lack ambition.  We'll see.

It's a wise child. . . 

—Novak Djokovic plays Andreas Seppi in the fourth round. Seppi has been playing some of the best tennis of his life. What did Djokovic think about the match-up?

"He's been I think terrific form. He's in best form I think in his life and won a tournament in Belgrade. So he's very famous in Serbia." Grinning, Djokovic continued. "I think half of Serbia will support Seppi, no, because of winning the trophy. . .  No, I'm kidding."

 Somehow, Nole, we knew that.

My upset special, though, is Tommy Haas over Richard Gasquet. I was not very impressed yesterday when I saw that Gasquet was complaining about how worn out he felt after what, by any standard, was a relatively swift, easy win over Grigor Dimitrov  - and one in which Dimitrov's cramping issues played a significant role.

The thing with Gasquet, in my mind, is that he's always there to be beaten. All you need to do is step up. I guess we'll see if Haas can pull it off soon enough. 

-- Pete 

by Pete Bodo

One of the more intriguing subplots at this year's French Open involves Olympic qualification, with the 56 direct entrants selected based on the computer rankings following the end of the tournament. It's a particularly pressing issue in the United States, which has a logjam of potential candidates. No nation is allowed more than four players in the singles draw, and six in total. The fourth spot (behind Serena Williams, Venus Williams, and Christina McHale) is still undecided. Both Varvara Lepchenko and Sloane Stephens are in the hunt for it.

Lepchenko had a fine win over struggling Jelena Jankovic yesterday, and while she's trying not to think about the Olympics, the media and various other folks are not making that easier.

"You know what, it would be really funny story, because yesterday I was sitting in the training room and I'm looking up at the scores I'm like, 'Oh, Vania King is losing (King went into Roland Garros ranked fourth among Americans). Wow. Okay, I think she had to defend something (ranking points) from all of your comments. I knew that.

So I was like, I'm not looking at the scoreboard anymore. I'm turning away and walking out of the training room and watching the TVs we have downstairs there. All the girls sitting down, all the players, they're talking about the Olympics. They're like, 'Oh, we're taking three or four players' and this and that.

I'm like, 'Shoot, I'm out of here.' So I'm walking up the stairs and I see the guy from Wilson (her racquet sponsor). He comes up to me, 'Varvara, I just have one question for you. . .'

I'm like, 'Yeah, sure. What is it?' He's like, 'Are you able to play Olympics? Are you qualified for the Olympics?' I'm like, 'Jeez, everybody now is going to ask me this question.' So I was like running away from the people. Like I don't want to think about it. I have to play. This is the most important. I can't think of all of those things. But it's good to know that now I'm the fourth American."

—Andy Murray's Olympic worries are centered on the back spasms that almost forced him to quit against Jarkko Nieminen. Surprisingly, Nieminen was unable to fully exploit Murray's struggles, and nobody was more surprised than Murray that he won a match he almost decided to stop playing. He explained about the back later, and boy, did he explain—three pages worth. It appears that his physio is of the "What's the worst that can happen?" school. 

"Well, it's like a back spasm. Everybody—I mean, anyone can get them at any stage.  t can happen. . . But my physio is one of the best. No doubt about that. His advice before the match was that by playing you're not going to do any permanent damage, so go out and give it a go. See how it feels. Then obviously it didn't feel good. So they were telling me to stop, and then I just kept going, and then it started to feel a bit better."

—Working one of the go-to themes at any clay-court tournament, a reporter asked Milos Raonic if he had a "different level of intimidation or concern" when it comes to playing a clay expert, now that he's gaining valuable experience. 

"No, I don't think I look at it that way. . . Right now we've gone through two months of the season, and you forget almost what you're playing on. You've accustomized to the playing on this surface; you've accustomized the movement. You don't think, 'What do I need to do differently because it's clay?' You just play."

You just play and invent new verbs (corrected from original) as you need them.

—Jo-Wilfried Tsonga is a big man, but he isn't one who lacks empathy. He was asked to comment on Arnaud Clement's swan song at the French Open. Now 34 and ranked No. 139, the 5'8" Clement went down with both guns blazing, a victim of Belgium's David Goffin. Tsonga replied:

"Well, to me he's a big guy, although he's a bit small. He's a short guy. But he's always set the example. He's always fought on the court. And I guess you need to be his size and play tennis to realize what a huge—how huge this is, because he's fighting against much bigger guys. Everything he did during his career is setting the example for young players.  part from that, there is not much to say. But exemplary, that's the word I would use to describe him."

Easy, big guy, you want to give Clement a complex about his height?

—When David Ferrer was asked about Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer's declaration that the balls are slower this year at Roland Garros, but faster then they were in Monte Carlo or Rome, he was a little reluctant to take a position—as you can see:

"Well, it's all relative, you see. Sometimes when the year goes by, you don't really remember your feelings. I think that the balls have more or less always been the same here.  In general, Roland Garros, in any way, is faster than Rome and Monte Carlo. It's always been the case. This is something I've always felt, in any case. I think it's quite similar, though, even though everything is relative."

Huh?

—It's bad enough to forget your spouse or main squeeze's birthday; some of us (ahem) can understand that. But how do you forget your own? For a moment there yesterday it seemed like Rafael Nadal did just that. He was asked, "If you're still here on Sunday, how do you plan to celebrate your birthday?"

He answered: "When is my birthday?"

Someone must have shouted out, 'June 3, Rafa!' because he immediately went on. "No, no, no, I don't know the day (of the week). . "

Informed that it was Sunday, he added,

"Sunday? So I gonna play Saturday...  Ah, I don't know, no? Is difficult to celebrate like good birthday when you are in the middle of the tournament, but sure, I gonna go for dinner with the team. I don't know if some family gonna come. I don't know yet. So we'll see. The important thing is I am in the third round and hopefully I can celebrate the birthday in Paris and not in Majorca."

Actually, tennis stuff aside, it kind of sounds like it would be more fun in Majorca.

—Richard Gasquet survived a wild and woolly affair with Grigor Dimitrov yesterday. After losing the first set, Dimtrov had the misfortune to cramp badly late in the second—a distraction that helped Gasquet win the set and go on to close out the match. Gasquet had problems of his own, but they had more to do with his stomach. A reporter discreetly asked if Gasquet "left a trace" on the court. Grinning, he said:

"Yes, I vomited the banana I ate at 5‑4. The banana is still on Suzanne Lenglen Court. I was really feeling bad. But he was on the ground (with cramps). He was even in a worse situation than I was."

I cannot confirm that the remains of the banana have been put on ice, for display in the Roland Garros museum in the event that Gasquet wins the tournament.

by Pete Bodo

If you were present when Svetlana Kuznetsova won the French Open in 2009, on a sunshot day when the jam-packed Court Philippe Chatrier resembled a bowl of multi-colored gumdrops, you could be forgiven for thinking that it was someone else out there, facing off this morning against this year's third seed, Agnieszka Radwanska. 

For one thing, the atmosphere seemed almost somber, under overcast skies. For another, the stadium was almost as empty as it usually is for the first of the men's semifinals (ask Roger Federer about that sometime)—but this time you couldn't even blame the corporate-entertainment crowd. That crew doesn't show up for a first-week match. Lastly, Kuznetsova looked as if she were impersonating someone, lest she be mistaken for. . . Svetlana Kuznetsova.

The big thing was the hair, done up with (I think) tightly wound braids pinned to her skull, so it looked like her temples were shaved while someone had artfully decorated the top of her head with a pastry bag. The effect was part Star Wars, part French provincial farm girl. The overall effect was Cosmic Milkmaid, which would not be out of character for our free-spirited Sveta.

Maybe that's a good thing, because it kept you from thinking how far the fortunes of the talented, two-time Grand Slam champ and former No. 2, now ranked 28th, have fallen. Kuznetsova has very good reasons to appear to be someone else. Lately, she has been practically anyone's "good win", losing to, among others, Jie Zheng, Iveta Benesova, and Lucie Safarova; not a major champ among them.

Radwanska, meanwhile, had been to the quarterfinals or better in 10 of her 11 tournaments this year. She beat Maria Sharapova in the Miami final and accumulated a 36-7 record going into Roland Garros—a whopping five of those losses inflicted by world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka. The other losses? One was a walkover (Radwanska pulled out of Kuala Lumpur after winning one match), the other a three-set failure against Petra Cetkovska.

But there was this: Since Radwanska won their first meeting (in the round-robin portion of the 2008 WTA Championships), Kuznetsova had beaten her five consecutive times before today—and was 9-3 against her overall—including a win that earned Sveta her last title, way back in 2010 (San Diego). If there's a lesson to take out of this match today, it was that you can't ever discount personal history. Kuznetsova may not have looked much like the woman who won it all in Paris in 2009, but for the better part of the day she played like that woman. The result was a stunning 6-1, 6-2 blowout of one of the most consistent players on the WTA.

The incredible thing about this match was how completely Kuznetsova looked like her better self; she's been in an extended slump, but it appears that all she really needed to pull out of it, at least temporarily, was a little bit of Aggie. 

Kuznetsova is a pleasure to watch when she's playing well, partly because she so beautifully shatters our stereotype of body types suited for high-level sports. I'm not hiding under her bed at the hotel, so I don't really know if she's in great shape, but even when she has been fit, Kuznetsova has not looked it. But that shapeless build and conspicously low center of gravity are great assets. She seems to roll rather than run, and I mean that in a good way. And her strokes can be explosive.

But then I also get a great kick out of Radwanska, and find myself wondering, Can this girl look any slower and more lazy?—knowing full well that she is neither. In reality, this was a match between striking eccentrics, which may help explain the big surprise. 

Kuznetsova rolled to a 6-1, 2-0 lead in no time, hitting 16 winners. When she's on her game, her ability to pull the trigger on the down-the-line placement—off either wing—to end a cross-court exchange is unparalleled. More important, she made just seven unforced errors in that first set, the same number as Radwanska, who specializes in avoiding them. 

But then, there was all that bad karma Kuznetsova has accumulated during these mostly fallow months. She grew a little careless, and Radwanska built a 15-40 lead while returning the third game of the second set. Radwanska made an error on the first break point, and Kuznetsova dismissed the second with a down-the-line forehand winner. Kuznetsova followed with a successful smash and a service winner to go up 3-0.

Radwanska held for 1-3, and Kuznetsova grew even slopper in her next service game. She fell into a good-point/bad-point rythm, and her form eroded before our very eyes. She lost the game when she mashed a forehand into the net, clearly choking. Suddenly, we were back on serve, and it looked as if we might have a match instead of a demonstration.

But Kuznetsova held fast. She forced deuce in the next game, then prevailed in a pair of rallies, each one ending with an uncharacteristic backhand error into the net by Radwanska. With that 4-2 lead, Kuznetsova reeled off the next seven points and ended things with a showy drive volley on her first match point. By then, the sun was peeking through, fans were drifting into Chatrier, and you could almost believe that it was 2009 again.

Ordinarily, that might end my report. But in one of those wonderful and typical Grand Slam concurrences, two big men were engaged in a Bullring court duel that was the polar opposite in tone. For there's nothing eccentric about the way either Tomas Berdych or Kevin Anderson plays, looks, or pursues his goals. They are big men; Berdych is 6'5", and Anderson taller yet—by three full inches. Both of them rock opponents with atomic serves and take ferocious cuts, uinterested in extending any point longer than necessary. 

Each man is having a good year. The steadily improving 26-year-old South African Anderson has climbed to No. 34, and Berdych, 17-4 on the year, is in the midst of one of his best clay-court seasons yet. Something had to give, and for a long time, as ESPN commentators Patrick McEnroe and Brad Gilbert were repeatedly falling back on the words "huge" and "incredible" and "unbelievable," it looked that it would be something other than these two guys. I assume that the the press box heroes were quaking, the memory of 6'9" John Isner's epic of yesterday still fresh in their tired minds.

The men split sets, and the third went to a tiebreaker. You had to give Bedych the edge, based on his deeper well of big-match experience, but Anderson was inspired. Anderson made a good return to force an error that put him up 3-1, and he won Berdych's next service point as well with—get this—a deft drop shot. Anderson lost just one point on serve and closed out the breaker, 7-4, when Berdych attacked but flubbed an easy smash near the net. It was one of the very few ugly points in the match.

Credit Berdych for keeping his cool in the next set; Anderson surely would have capitalized on any letdown by the No. 7 seed. And while Berdych didn't win more than a lone point in Anderson's first four service games, he won the coveted four in his fifth to get the critical break to 5-4. Berdych survived a break point in the next game to take the set, 6-4.

The conflict was so fierce that both men summoned the trainer for a quick rubdown on their rubbery legs following the third game of the fifth set. The interlude made no appreciable difference; both men held to 3-all. By that time, Anderson had rained down 21 aces, but in the end he might have traded half of them in if he could take back the double fault (just his third of the match) that he hit at break point. With that 4-2 lead, Berdych rolled downhill to a 6-4, 3-6, 6-7 (4), 6-4, 6-4 win, both men blasting away to the bitter end.

Once again, we're left wondering, has Berdych's time finally come? And once again, we're toying with the idea that Kuznetsova's time has come, and gone, and come again.