My gracious hosts at Indian Wells wanted to know what time I would be home for dinner. I told them not to hold dinner for me; there were two men’s semi-finals and a women’s final to be played during the afternoon and I expected to be at the stadium for a good seven or eight hours.

I was wrong. I could have been home for dinner by six and that is not a good thing.

Earlier this week, Bill Simon of Inside Tennis asked Rafael Nadal an interesting question. He wondered if Nadal was getting too comfortable with his No.2 ranking. Did he still have a burning desire to be No.1? It took a few people to successfully translate the question into Spanish but Nadal finally answered that he was comfortable with No.2 because he didn’t see an opportunity to be No.1, although his goal, of course, is to be No.1.

Andy Roddick will now have to decide how comfortable he is at No.3 because he lost badly to Nadal in the first semi-final, 6-4, 6-3. Roddick is more than 1,000 points behind Nadal in the ATP rankings and less than 100 in front of Nikolay Davydenko, so Simon’s question is important because this is competitive sport: if you’re not moving forward then you’re probably slipping backwards.

All credit to Roddick for climbing back to No.3 after a horrible start last year, but how does he move forward now? Some of his problems against Nadal were temporary. During the three games he lost his serve, he got only three deliveries into the court.

I said Roddick would have problems later in the week if he tried to serve and volley because those higher-ranked guys hit very good passing shots. But he also had trouble getting to the net because Nadal’s topspin kicked up and kept him behind the baseline. Roddick realises he has to do something. After the match he said: "We were talking about it, Jimmy (Connors) and I just now, and we said, we’re going to have to go back and look at this match and think about what we would try to do a little bit differently."

Nadal said he had his best match of the year and clearly Roddick did not, so the gap isn’t as wide as it looked. But this is the era of the supercoach and I’m looking forward to seeing what Connors comes up with next.

After Andy Murray dismantled Tommy Haas in the quarter-finals you have to appreciate the Scot and his coach Brad Gilbert. We know Gilbert can coach a player to No.1 -- he did it with Andre Agassi -- and it’ll be fun to see how Connors deals with the challenge.

Both women’s finalists, Daniela Hantuchova and Svetlana Kuznetsova, suffered from early success. Hantuchova won the title here in 2002 and hadn’t won a tournament since. She got the second title of her career winning it 6-3, 6-4 and five years after her first title she’s much better prepared for the job.

Kuznetsova won the 2004 US Open and reached a career-high No.4 then had a terrible 2005 before winning Miami and getting to the French Open final last year. She is now back at No.4 again. 

This tournament has been a bit of a letdown because Justine Henin and Amelie Mauresmo are not here and Maria Sharapova went out early. Kuznetsova explained it like this: "Justine, Amelie, they were not here this week. And then, afterwards, other top players that lose early. And for me not to make the final would feel very low. At least I made it.”

So perhaps that was the problem: being satisfied with the final, because she had trouble keeping the ball in the court and she let Hantuchova dictate the match with aggressive play. 

The last match of the day featured the two best young players on the ATP tour: Murray and Novak Djokovic. Murray is ranked at 14 and Djokovic 13. Their games and their temperaments are very different and it should have been fun to see them slug it out on the hard court but it wasn’t.

Murray hurt his ankle and his hip during his win over Haas in the quarter-finals but he played in the semis because he was told he would not do any more damage to himself. He later described the decision to continue playing as "unprofessional" and said he had learned a lesson which would serve him later in his career.

Murray couldn’t move and that’s the biggest part of his game. Djokovic won easily 6-2, 6-3 and moved into the top ten for the first time in his career.

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