Frances Tiafoe Lost A Tennis Match After A Controversial Umpire Call And He Lost His Shit At Him Afterwards
Man I love tennis. The old heads of the sport are talking about how disrespectful this is, how Tiafoe should get a big fine, suspension, yada yada. I understand tennis is relatively niche on this blog, so let me try to explain this entire situation to make it a bit easier to understand. First, Frances Tiafoe is probably one of the most popular players on tour, mainly because of his electric US Open runs trying to restore glory back to American tennis:
Anyway, he was playing a Russian tennis player named Roman Safiullin in the round of 32 overnight and it ended up going to a third set tiebreak. When players are serving in tennis, you have a serve clock, that is probably one of the most unenforced rules in sports. This is how the argument started after Tiafoe was called for a violation in the most crucial point of the match:
He ended up losing this point and then the next one, ending the match. For some additional context, when you get called for a serve violation you automatically move onto a second serve. Those are almost always won at a less percentage than your first serve, where you can put more speed/spin/power/etc on your ball because you have the second serve in your back pocket. There's no telling if Tiafoe would have lost the point anyway, but it's easy to see how he got frustrated with an umpire call like that. When I say unenforced, it's generally because it's still technically umpire discretion. A lot of times, like it or not, superstar players like Djokovic/Sinner/Alcaraz/etc will get away with cutting it too close to the serve clock. In the clip, you see Tiafoe aimlessly throw the ball into the air, which would indicate he's getting ready to serve, voiding the potential violation.
The umpire wasn't convinced and thought he was just doing that because he looked over at the clock and knew he was screwed, which is up to interpretation and we'll never truly know. There's also an argument to be made that a call like this at that point of the match, which was over 3 hours and players were obviously fatigued, should be excused in the name of a good and quality match overall.
But if I know anything about the ATP, tennis fans and journalists alike, Tiafoe is gonna face some serious fines here and some locos calling for a suspension too. And for what it's worth, Tiafoe is almost always composed and this is so far out of his character, so you gotta take into account that he maybe actually thought he got hosed by the umpire here.
More to come.
Post-publish edit:
Tiafoe just issued an apology, there's no point in blogging just this but if you're curious to his response: