In the words of the popular children’s card game: “Go Fish”. Mardy Fish has been such a perennial underachiever in his eight years on the American undercard at Flushing Meadows that reaching the US Open quarter-finals yesterday did not only come as a revelation to him, it may well have caused a few red lights to be run in his home town of Edina, Minnesota.

Fish came into his postmatch interview looking like something out of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, huge bagfuls of ice on his right shoulder and forearm lending him a lopsided, sinister look enhanced by his all-black attire. And that is precisely what Fish has given to the men’s singles at the US Open - a lopsided impression of how it was expected to be for American hopes on home cement.

Fish knew that his only chance of defeating Gaël Monfils, the French Open semi-finalist, was to be relentless, to give him no room to move. His 7-5, 6-2, 6-2 victory in a minute under two hours was a cracking endorsement of the manner in which he decided to play. Monfils was constantly at full stretch and, unfortunately for him, there is not the give in the surface here that he enjoys at Roland Garros.

Roger Rasheed, the Australian, who began coaching Monfils in July, was not exactly overjoyed at the performance of his charge on his 22nd birthday. “I think Gaël played one aggressive point in the whole match. He did everything the opposite of what we had talked about beforehand,” Rasheed said. “He is far too good a player to be just reaching the last 16 of any grand slam and if he is happy with that, I’m not. He said he would have rather been injured than play as badly as that, so that was something.” These, though, were Fish’s elements and he utilised them voraciously. It has not been easy for him over the years, growing up in the shadow of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, not being quite good enough to steal the spotlight from Andy Roddick and James Blake, a cheerleader at the nation’s Davis Cup successes, a player to be considered - but not for too long - as a possible for the second week in the grand-slam tournaments. Until yesterday.

Four years ago, Fish was heading upstream to No 17 in the rankings but, as bad luck and timing would have it, he missed seven weeks with hip tendin-itis, then suffered an injury to his left wrist during a practice session in Rome in 2005. He tried to come back too soon and needed a second operation to knit the pieces together. Upon his return the next year, he was ranked at No 341, recovering to No 47 by the year’s end to win the Comeback Player of the Year title. Here, he is in danger of winning the “Improbable American Achievement of the Tournament” trophy.

It will be his for sure if he can ruin Rafael Nadal’s attempt to win the French Open, Wimbledon and US Open in the same year. If he takes a leaf from the book of Sam Querrey, his compatriot, it just may happen. Nadal lost his first set of the championships yesterday to the beanpole from Thousand Oaks, California, and was taken to a tie-break in the third set.

Querrey has said that the lowest point of his career came last year when he lost in a challenger series event at Surbiton to Jim May, a part-timer from Kent, who rang his mum while putting his racket back into his bag to tell her what he had just done. But he ripped shots past Nadal to the extent that it required all of the world No 1’s reservoirs of character to hold him at bay. The Spaniard saw it through 6-2, 5-7, 7-6, 6-3.

Dinara Safina, the French Open finalist from Russia, broke down in tears before her 7-6, 6-0 victory over Anna-Lena Grönefeld, the German qualifier. Why? “Honestly, going on the court, I didn’t expect that I was going to win because I was just so exhausted. I finished the warm-up and said, ‘I cannot push myself any more’. Once I go on court, I’m not going to think.” Strange folk, tennis players.