Paes can’t swallow Wimbledon pain

Leander Paes says he will take a while to get over Sunday's mixed doubles loss at Wimbledon

Paes can't swallow Wimbledon pain

Leander Paes says he will take a while to get over Sunday's mixed doubles loss at Wimbledon

IT'S not often that Leander Paes is disappointed to the extent that he shuts off completely. But when he and partner Cara Black (the top seeds) went down in the Wimbledon mixed doubles final 7-5, 6-3 to ninth seeds Mark Knowles and Anna-Lena Groenefeld on Sunday, the Indian tennis ace just could not take the loss and went into hiding.

"I was in my room simply beating myself up for two days," he said in a lighter vein as he spoke to MiD DAY 48 hours later on the shocking defeat at All-England.

Have you got over the defeat at Wimbledon?
No. And I don't think I will get over it for a while. I can't believe we lost but at the same time I take full responsibility for it. Cara played her heart out and is not to blame at all. I feel bad for her. I let her down.
I feel terrible for all those fans who stayed up late that night to watch our final (held after the Andy Roddick-Roger Federer marathon men's singles final). I'm thoroughly disappointed.

Can you explain what really went wrong?
The most surprising part of it all is that I cannot explain why we lost. Sometimes your opponents play so well that you can't help but doff your hat to them and accept defeat. On other occasions, you play so badly that defeat is inevitable. But on Sunday it was nothing of this sort. It's not that we played too many bad shots or blundered on the unforced errors front. The defeat is inexplicable and that's why it hurts.

Can a defeat hurt that much?
Yes, when you lose like this and that too in a Wimbledon final, it can really hurt. After all, Wimbledon is the Mecca of tennis a wonderful tournament. It's the kind of place you dream of being at as a kid.u00a0 And it's not that I can't take defeat or cannot accept second place in a tournament. I've been around long enough not to think like that.

Then why are you so low?
I'm sad because I've lost in quite a few finals at the Slams, but not like this. See, sometimes I do play a few bad shots and maybe for about 10-15 minutes we are down, but then I pull myself up and it's fine. But on Sunday, after we were leading 5-2 in the first set, I don't know what happened. It was as though I was in a trance and before we realised it, the match was over.

Is it tough to accept because you reached the final rather comfortably?
Maybe that's true. Even in the semis (against Brazil's Andre Sa and Japan's Ai Sugiyama), we won easily (6-3, 6-3 in 71 minutes). But that doesn't mean we took the final lightly. We had our game plan in place but nothing clicked.

The 10th Grand Slam seems elusive...
I hope I can change that statistic at the US Open. We are defending champions for the year's last Grand Slam (which begins on August 31) and I hope I can make it up to Cara in New York.

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