2005 Italian Open News
By Eleanor
Preston | May 04, 2005
 If
the clothes maketh the man, then Andy Roddick’s
switch to a European label manufacturer seems to
be paying off, at least when it comes to playing
on the continental red clay of Rome.
Wednesday saw Roddick, resplendent in white Lacoste garb more often seen on the
likes of Arnaud Clement and Alex Corretja, put former French Open champion Albert
Costa in his place with a 6-4, 7-5 victory to move through to the third round
of the Rome Masters.
As much as Lacoste are proud of their new acquisition and the fact that they
trumped Nike’s bid to get him, Roddick’s win probably had more to
do with the way he played than what he played in and perhaps also owed a little
to the fact that Costa has never played quite as well as he did to hit his career
peak at Roland Garros in 2002.
“It does a lot for my confidence to beat someone who has probably been
one of the top five or six clay-courters of the last ten years and whose had
success at this tournament,” said Roddick. “It’s a big mental
hurdle to beat someone at their game and on their surface.”
The American has changed his preparation (as well as his clothes) in the run
up to this year’s clay court season. He has worked hard on trimming himself
down and equipping himself better physically for the kind of long, gruelling
points he can expect to play in the coming weeks. The gym work paid of well in
Houston, where he won the title, but American clay and Europe’s red clay
can be as different as day and night and it is on the European red
stuff that he still needs to prove that he can live with the best.
“I don’t really have a chip on my shoulder or anything like that,” he
said. “It’s almost nice to be where no-one is expecting me to do
anything and all of a sudden I’m in the third round and people are shocked.
It’s not like that for me very often so it’s a nice change. I feel
like I’m playing well enough to maybe surprise some people.”
He faces a familiar foe in the shape of Fernando Verdasco in the third round,
the man who pushed him to three tough sets in Indian Wells in March and was on
the other side of the net when he retired from his first match in Miami when
he was attempting to defend his Nasdaq-100 Open title.
“He’s nasty” said Roddick. “Throwing another Spaniard
at me. We had a tough match in Indian Wells and he was getting the better of me
in Miami before I had to stop so it’s going to be a tough one. I’m
going to have to keep my level up.”
He could do a
lot worse than match the level set by Andre Agassi, who ripped past Richard Gasquet
6-2, 6-3 with the kind of zeal he reserves for opponents he expects to be dangerous.
Gasquet certainly had the potential to be that, not least because this former
prodigy (he turned pro at 15 after a glorious junior career and is still only
18) blossomed in some style in Monte Carlo, where he beat Roger Federer
to make the semi-finals.
Agassi never allowed him to find that form and, in truth, the Frenchman’s
challenge never really got off the ground and he certainly had little opportunity
to remind Agassi of the 16-year age gap between them.
“To me he’s just an opponent. I don’t really think about the
age unless we’re sitting down in a bar and he can’t sit there because
he’s not old enough,” smiled Agassi. “On a tennis court it’s
always about the game. There were a lot of unforced errors, a lot of double faults.
That’s a lot of free points. I did that too, a long time ago, sometimes
I even do it now. My guess is he was nervous at the beginning. I’m sure
it wasn’t his best match.”
Agassi, of course, once advertised Nike’s clothes with the famous – or
infamous, if you prefer – tagline “image is everything”. Roddick,
new clothes and all, might well concur.
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