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Weather yesterday evening wasn’t very good as it was raining but it didn’t stop me from going to Malawati Stadium in Shah Alam. After so many roundabouts I reached there about half-an-hour before the scheduled time… so there’s still time to look around. Was my first time here but there wasn’t much to see anyway, other than the tennis supporters who came in their working attire.

I didn’t take my dinner as I thought they should have stalls offering free food! Hahaha…

However, I ended up having Haagen-Dazs for dinner! RM10 for a small cup like this, vanilla flavor. Very creamy and delicious but too little. OK, this is the appetizer for today’s post. Are you ready for the Clash of the Titans?!

At 8pm, I thought the players should now come in and start the game… but hold on, the organizers decided to throw in more appetizers for us!

The stadium was about 30% occupied now, maybe that’s the reason the had so many performances prior to the game. They wanted to buy time to wait for the late comers? By 8:30pm, the players were finally ushered into the stadium… everybody went crazy, screaming, screaming, clapping… “Nadal,… Gasquet,… Nadal…”. The stadium was at most 40% occupied now. There was still plenty of empty seats.

Look how small Nadal and Gasquet are in the photo above. You can imagine how far I was seated… This photo was taken with no zooming and both the players looked so tiny. How to recognize who is who? Blue is Nadal and red is Gasquet.

That’s the problem of no buying the VIP tickets and not owning one of the mega-zoom cameras. If only I have one of those DSLR with 12x zooms! Time to get a new camera specially for this sort of events, eh?

That’s Richard Gasquet, deserving full support from me for showing some great one-handed backhand. This picture was taken with full 3x optical zoom, still very small. No picture of Nadal adjusting his spandex.

This was a match of best of 3 sets. As predicted, Rafael Nadal didn’t let the crowd down by winning 3-6, 6-2, 6-3. However, I believe actually Gasquet stand a very good chance to win especially with his stunning easy win in the first set. Don’t you like his near-perfect backhands? But don’t know what happened to him to lose the second as easily as winning the first one. Perhaps a little lack of concentration…

Check out the following video for example. How could Gasquet not able to return this easily?

No wonder, some audience said both of them didn’t play their best. Anyone know about their prizes? Got RM1 million or not?

I think the ticket prices should be lowered in order to attract more tennis fans to be able to watch this live, not on Astro, but in the stadium. Isn’t it better to lower the prices to pack the stadium to 90% or even 100%, rather than at a pathetic 40% occupancy? The organizers should be able to get back the same amount of money anyway…

Let’s hope the turn out rate will be much much higher for the Clash of the Times, Roger Federer vs Pete Sampras. Can’t wait for Thursday 8pm!

Last shot of the match. Nadal’s winning shot which obviously got the crowd jumping high and low with joy!

Tags: clash of the titans, malaysia, rafael nadal, richard gasquet, shah alam, tennis