Q. What's the experience like of playing him? He has a lot of speed, power.
JAMES BLAKE: Yeah, he played great. Serve was probably giving me the most trouble. When he was making first serves, it made it really difficult for me to get into points. He has such an aggressive style, if you block that first one back, you're going to be running. You're going to be in trouble. That was a big problem for me.
I didn't take advantage of some of the opportunities I had on some second serves. Just, yeah, a little frustrating. Didn't feel like I served well. Didn't feel like I returned well. Otherwise it was okay.
Those are two pretty important parts of the game. Especially on the returns, it's one that I usually take pride in being pretty good at. Didn't execute today. Didn't make a lot of ‑‑ didn't get a lot of free points on my first serve, which, you know, can make it tough to work all day that way.

Q. Was he varying the speed on the second to change it up on you?
JAMES BLAKE: Yeah, he was varying the speed. He did a good job. But I still felt like I could have done a better job returning, especially in that tiebreaker, missing two pretty easy ones that I thought I could have really taken advantage of.


Q. Were the fireworks frustrating or were you hoping it might slow him down?
JAMES BLAKE: No. I've dealt with different things. In any match, there's injury time‑outs, things happen in the crowd. Anything could happen. We were prepared for that beforehand. They told us that it was going to happen around that time.
They wanted to try to do it on a changeover, then see if we wanted to sit it out. If one person wanted to sit and not play through it, then we wouldn't play through it. He didn't want to play through it. So we sat there and waited for, whatever, 10 minutes.

Q. How would you rate his form compared to when you last played him in Paris?
JAMES BLAKE: He did it consistently this time. He did it over three sets instead of two. He managed to keep his level that high. It was a similar serving performance. Might have been a little better in Paris. But from the baseline and from returning, I think he did even better here.

Q. When he's playing his big game like that, where do you think he sort of fits in, in terms of the big games you played against over the years?
JAMES BLAKE: I don't know. They seem to keep getting bigger and bigger. You know, it's just the nature of the game. It gets better every year.
You know, I don't want to try to compare guys now to guys 10 years ago because I generally don't think that's fair and I don't think it's really relevant. So I don't know.
I mean, it's bigger than the last few guys I've played. So that's all I have to compare it to right now. Hopefully I'll figure out a way to combat that next time. But for right now, it was big enough to beat me.

Q. How do you fancy his chances to win the tournament?
JAMES BLAKE: I don't know. I'll leave that to the commentators and the sportswriters and people that, you know, seem to know the game better than me.


(via AO Tennis Championship 2009, photo/Reuters Pictures)

James Blake - Australian Open 26. January Interview