Saisai Zheng and the case of the curious Rogers Cup stringing machine (updated)

MONTREAL – For 22-year-old Saisai Zheng of China, Tuesday evening's marquee match at the Rogers Cup against homegirl Françoise Abanda turned out to be a bit of a nightmare.

As the ball flew off her racquet in the first set when she barely even touched it, and Abanda won the set 6-1, she knew something was drastically wrong. When she changed to her second racquet, same problem.

By the time Zheng got a racquet she could work with, it was a little too late. She ended up losing 6-1, 7-5 and as it turns out, the home stringer inadvertently did Montrealer Abanda a big-time favour.

"At the beginning of the warmup I felt my racquet was really loose, but I thought maybe I was a little bit nervous because of the big crowd. When I started, three games after, I feel right away I cannot play with this because I can only touch the ball, and it flies away," Zheng told Eh Game earlier today, after her warmup for her doubles match.

"Then I changed to another racquet, one pound up, and I played three games again, the same - just too loose. So I told the umpire to string another new one and at the end, they gave me back," she added.

Normally, Zheng strings her racquets at 52 pounds for the main strings, and 50 pounds for the crosses.

It was all rather dramatic but according to the owner of TennisZon, the local tennis equipment outlet that is the official stringer for the tournament and also operates all the merchandising at the tournament, it may not have been quite as bad as it sounds.

Pierre-Alain Dubois said the stringer used a gadget called a RT-4 tension meter to check the racquet. It's a notoriously unreliable piece of equipment, which is why Dubois said it's never used with the pros and in this case was done more to placate Zheng, who was quite upset when the came into the stringers' area..

It's more for the casual tennis player who comes into the shop with a racquet they haven't had restrung for a few years, to give them an idea of where the tension is.

"About 10 minutes later, we did it again, and it came up 49 pounds, just a pound or two off (the requested tension). The truth is probably somewhere in between," Dubois said. He added the Babolat stringing machines – there are three of them used for the players – are tested every morning and that SImon Greene, who strung Zheng's racquets, is his most experienced stringer and reputed as one of the best in Canada.

"Most of the time the players want to have their racquets strung by the same stringer on the same machine – especially when things are going well," said Dubois, who added that this was the case with Greene and Zheng.

"Obviously, I'm really sorry for Mrs. Zheng, if there was an error. I’m not prepared to say there was but it there was, I’m really sorry," he  said.

In the end, the attempt to placate Zheng ended up backfiring, big time, as the reading done when Zheng was present came up with a huge disparity.

Duboissaid that there had been another player who had complained about the tension in her racquets after a defeat and to stave off an avalanche, the machine was moved into the retail and another machine brought for the pros, and tested.

Zheng said that sort of things just can't happen at a tournament of this magnitude, and that nothing even remotely close to that had ever happened to her before.

Certainly something seemed off during her match, but the problem only came to light when Zheng sent out this Tweet last night.

Here's what she looked like out on the doubles court - definitely in much better spirits although she and partner YiFan Xu lost their first-round match.

Zheng said tournament director Eugene Lapierre came to her after her doubles match and apologized personally And the stringer didn't charge her for the string jobs, which run $25 per racquet at this tournaent. Small comfort, though.