Gasquet completes remarkable comeback

By rights, the purple and green flag which fluttered within view of the All England Club here should have been replaced by a tricolore yesterday evening after an extraordinarily good day for France saw Marion Bartoli reach today's women's final, and Richard Gasquet, the prodigy who is finally coming of age, claim a place in the semi-finals after coming from two sets down against the third seed, Andy Roddick.

The bad news reached Gasquet shortly after his 4-6, 4-6, 7-6, 7-6, 8-6 victory. His semi-final today is scheduled for 12 noon - when he will have the pleasure of a Centre Court encounter with the defending champion, Roger Federer.

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"I believe to maybe play at three or four," Gasquet said. "At noon? That's hard. That's not good news." Federer has said that Gasquet is the player whose game he most appreciates, but he is unlikely to be standing back to enjoy the view today as he seeks to maintain his progress towards a fifth consecutive title.

Roddick, maintaining his habitual sense of humour in the wake of what he acknowledged had been his hardest recent defeat to take, had his own take on the scenario which has been fashioned by the Wimbledon organisers.

"Well, considering it's eight in the evening right now, and Roger's played for an hour in the last week, I'm going to go out on a limb and say Roger's probably the fresher of the two," said the man from Omaha, Nebraska. "I don't know if that bodes well for Richard."

Gasquet himself was sensibly cautious about his prospects of beating the third and top seeds within the space of 24 hours. "I don't know," he said. "I have no pressure. If I win the first set tomorrow, everything can happen."

Gasquet's talent was being widely proclaimed many years ago - he was just nine when he appeared on the front cover of French Tennis magazine - but it has taken a while for the world junior champion of 2002 to translate his sublime gifts to the senior game. Tomorrow's match will be his first Grand Slam semi-final.

"I think it's a great day for me," he said. "But I hope that's the beginning of my career. Of course, it was really hard for me with the pressure in France because I played maybe too good too early. At 16 years old I wasn't ready to support this pressure, all the journalists, all the crowd, all the people. After it was really hard for me."

Bartoli offered an explanation of why French players, who have struggled so often at their home Grand Slam on the clay of Roland Garros, now appear to be flourishing on English turf.

"I think our game is more fitting to the faster court than the slowest court," she said. "It's as simple as this. Even if we have the Grand Slam on clay and we have a lot of clay courts in France, our games, the way we are practising when we are young players, we are more practising an attacking game, to go to the net, to go hit the ball. That's why I think we are playing so well on grass."

Meanwhile, Roddick, beaten finalist of 2004 and 2005, was left to rue what he described as "another lost opportunity at Wimbledon," adding: "I don't know if I really need to spell it out for all of you. I'd love to make you try and understand what it feels like in the pit of your stomach right now - when you put your blood, sweat and tears, everything you have into something, and you can almost taste it, you envision something and it doesn't work out, it's not easy." Facing his coach, Jimmy Connors, is unlikely to be a breeze either.