Little Lenny Federer steals the show

Melbourne - Young American Taylor Fritz lost to Roger Federer

Roger Federer had a special guest in his courtside box watching him beat Taylor Fritz - his son Lenny, and he stole the show. As the Swiss master was doing a courtside interview Lenny was more interested in poking his coach Ivan Ljubicic in the face. "There he goes. The coach is being very serious, I love that," Federer said. "I didn't even know he (Lenny) was going to come to the stadium. For me it was a very special match and I'm happy Lenny was there." Federer has two sets of twins, two boys and two girls, with wife Mirka.
Young American Taylor Fritz lost to Roger Federer is round three at Melbourne Park and Nick Kyrgios jokingly took some of the blame. The controversial Australian was on commentary duties for television and said Fritz was one of his best mates on tour, but they spend more time playing video games than on the practice court. "He is a bit of a gamer himself. For him to improve, I have to let him off the video games and do more training and see how it goes," he said, adding: "He is a good guy."
The new tie-break rules Australian organisers introduced this year in a bid to curb the tournament's notorious late nights have been a failure if the tournament's opening rounds are anything to go by. Finishing times in the first four days of the season-opening Grand Slam have been 11:08pm, 2:08am, 12:36 am and 3:12am, with the latter featuring a record late start of 12:30 am for the match between Garbine Muguruza and Johanna Konta. The British number one labelled the early morning matches "dangerous" while Maria Sharapova complained about being kept up past her bedtime. For the first time this year, matches have an extended tie-break in the final set when the score reaches 6-6, rather than a traditional full set. To win the decisive tie-break, a player will need to be the first to 10 with an advantage of at least two points.
Konta revealed the bizarre reason her late-night epic against Muguruza could not be moved to an outside court so it could start earlier. "We were actually going to go out to court three to start," she said. "There was basically seagull poo everywhere. They had to clean the court. By the time they would have cleaned the court, we would have been in the same boat anyway."
Seventh seed Dominic Thiem could be forgiven for wanting to get the heck out of Melbourne after a miserable week ended with him limping out of the Australian Open when 7-5, 6-4, 2-0 down to young wildcard Alexei Popyrin. The Austrian had already endured a near four-hour first-round five-setter against Benoit Paire which didn't end until 2.08am on Wednesday morning. He was back on court a little over a day later and never looked 100 percent against the unheralded Australian, smashing his racquet in frustration before retiring. Just to add to his pain, he then got slapped with a $4,000 dollar fine for racquet abuse. Taxi for Dominic, anyone?