Another Marat who met his end in Paris. Image via wikimedia.org

View full size photo »

In his last ATP match, wild card Marat Safin fell 6-4, 5-7, 6-4 to fifth-seeded Juan Martin del Potro, in a valiant effort befitting the great tennis abilities he showed over his career.

The story of the middle part of this match was mostly about nerves, surprisingly more del Potro's than Safin's.  It can't be an easy thing to be charged with terminating a colleague's career, which was exactly the task set before del Potro.  Del Potro completely choked away the second set, breaking himself at 5-6, but obtained and held onto an early break in the third that gave him the win.

Safin was pretty thoroughly outplayed throughout the entire match, but managed to keep things uncomfortable for del Potro with some aggressive serving and go for broke groundstrokes, always aiming for the lines constantly with little if any margin for error.  He fired 15 aces during the match, and threw in another dozen or so service winners, including some on match points late in the third to force del Potro to serve it out.

As the PA played "Crimson and Clover," Safin gathered for photos with a collection of some nice names from the recent past of tennis (Younes El Aynaoui, Marc Rosset, Albert Portas, Cedric Pioline) as well as some current tournament entrants who didn't have anything else going on at that time in the afternoon (del Potro, Novak Djokovic, Gilles Simon, Ivo Karlovic, Tommy Robredo).  Safin was presented a key to the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy, though it was mounted to a glass stand so it's unclear how it would actually open any doors.

I'll have more of a big-picture retrospective on Safin's time in tennis during his profile in the upcoming series on the top ten ATP players of the decade, which will run on The Daily Forehand during the off-season (along with a parallel series for the WTA).  There were as many big downs as big ups in Safin's relatively short career, but it's better to have burned brightly and quickly than never to have shone at all, I suppose.