The pain continues for Davydenko

The misery continued for Nikolay Davydenko in Paris today, as he appeared to suffer from some sort of mental block in a straight sets defeat to Marcos Baghdatis.

The world number four's service action totally collapsed, with many serves coming off the frame and others hitting the bottom of the net or landing several feet long and wide of the service line; some landed nearer the baseline than the service line.

At one point in the second set, the umpire Cedric Maurier starting giving advice to Davydenko and telling him to serve like he would! Totally bizarre and this all boils down to the precedent set last week in St Petersburg, when Davydenko was fined for not trying.

In all my years of watching tennis, I have never seen an umpire tell a player how to serve, let alone have the nerve to suggest that the world number four should forget his own game and serve like the umpire does down at the Paris municipal courts, but it happened today during several changeovers and Davydenko appeared close to tears for the second consecutive tournament.

Baghdatis eventually put Davydenko out of his misery 6-2, 6-2 and the unforced error stats for Davydenko make shocking reading for the defending champion. Ten double faults, broken five times and just one point won on second serve in the match.

The last time I can recall a mental aberration on serve of this magnitude was a few years back when Guillermo Coria lost the plot and was completely unable to make a serve. It became so bad that Coria went into semi retirement, before coincidentally making a comeback last week.

The treatment of Davydenko by the umpires, both this week and last could be interpreted a number of ways and will contribute to a number of conspiracy theories. Perhaps the ATP findings into the match fixing allegations are starting to leak out and there is a bit of a witch hunt developing against Davydenko? Maybe all the attention and suspicion has adversely affected the Russian to the point where he is now unable to play? How about Davydenko is about to be banned from the tour and the officials feel they have carte blanche to say what they like?

What we do know is that Nikolay Davydenko's career currently hangs in the balance.