EVERY MORNING the gutters of Paris are awash with clean water as the previous day's detritus is slooshed away and a fresh start made. At Roland Garros the clear out is every bit as effective, except it has been the top players who have disappeared down the drain.

Yesterday both champions were swept into oblivion. Steffi Graf fell in two sets to her current nemesis, Amanda Coetzer, while Yevgeny Kalelnikov lost his quarter-final to the blue and yellow boy from Brazil, Gustavo Kuerten.

The men's tournament in this quite extraordinary French Open has now taken on the look of the Northern Open at Didsbury. There were mighty peculiar goings-on at. Wimbledon last year, but this is French madness.

Kuerton will now play the Belgian qualifier, Filip Dewulf, in the semi-finals. A few years ago, Dewulf was close to a nervous breakdown. Last night, French television's head of sport was heading the same way. Dewulf versus Spain's Galo Blanco in Sunday's final? Merde and double merde.

Kafelnikov was spectacularly ousted 6-2, 5-7, 2-6, 6-0, 6-4 by an opponent who has burst from almost total obscurity to the brink of a Grand Slam final in less than 10 days.

The 66th-ranked Brazilian was excellent value for his win and could yet develop into one of the new stars that men's tennis has been quietly seeking.

"I just cannot believe it . . . I'm so happy I can't speak," gasped Kuerten, after registering a third successive five-set win, which had looked extremely unlikely when he went two sets to one down beneath dark, threatening skies on Centre Court.

Kafelnikov, though, felt his opponent's agility and eager hitting from the baseline would have demanded respect in any company.

"His ground strokes are really impressive. He was making shots from all angles of the court," said the world number three.

Graf's defeat, meanwhile, was an accident waiting to happen. "I can't watch her when she plays like this," said Virginia Wade during the rain break, Graf having lost the opening set. Many had the same problem with our former Wimbledon champion, but as she cheerfully admitted yesterday: "I was never as good as Steffi".

The Graf forehand, that pure expression of the German's athleticism, never remotely functioned as an explosive force. She made a string of unusual unforced errors and hit winners only occasionally to lose 6-1, 6-4 after one hour and 32 minutes of a one-sided quarter-final clash.

"I didn't seem to find the reach or the patience at all," said the German second seed after living a nightmare on a miserable afternoon in the French capital.

South African Coetzer, who had already beaten Graf twice this season, including a 6-0, 6-1 annihilation at the German Open in Berlin last month, said she realised that Graf was not at her best,

"She's not playing her best tennis right now," Coetzer, seeded 11th, said. "You can sense that she lacks confidence. She's had some injury problems and maybe she's not 100 per cent fit."

Graf, still wearing a bandage on the injured left knee which kept her. out of action for three months earlier this year, trailed 6-1, 3-1 when rain interrupted play for some 30 minutes.

After the break, she picked up her game a little, but missed several opportunities of levelling the second set at 5-5 before going out.

"I was willing to stay out there as long as it was going to take, but she was definitely starting to play better," Coetzer said. "It was getting really tight."

But Graf said she had never felt she had a chance of winning the match.

"I sat down during the break but I didn't manage to calm down," said Graf, who lost her temper on several occasions on court, swearing loudly in German. "I just couldn't find the positive attitude I needed."

Graf said she would now take a few days off before preparing for her favourite event, Wimbledon, which she has won seven times.

"I'll probably stop playing tennis for a few days," she said. "That will do me good."

The South African, 5ft 2ins of pugnacious competitiveness, hurtles around like a Jack Russell on speed. Graf, for all her 21 Grand Slam singles titles, including five here, is not one of the game's great tacticians, and her patience frequently ran out in the face of Coetzer's persistence.

The 27-year-old German, who first appeared on the professional circuit 14 years ago, said she had already been through difficult periods in her career.

"It has happened quite a few times," she said. "I think that in anybody's career, you get stages when everything is not quite right.

I've been through it already.

"The state I am in, I don't seem to have any self-confidence," said Graf. " Even during the rain break, I did not find a positive attitude towards the match." She was later still too despondent to attend the annual Champions' dinner.

For the first time in a decade, Graf will now, under the WTA's new ranking system, fall below number two, with Monica Seles slipping past after her quarter-final win over fellow American Mary-Joe Fernandez.

Seles had been beaten only once, in the dim and distant past, by Fernandez, but when she lost the first set, the prospect of yet another leading player going down the swannee appeared not the least remote.

Grimacing like an animated gargoyle, and grunting like a wart hog, the former world number one eventually imposed her strength and will on Fernandez, who has fallen so many times at this stage during her Grand Slam career.

Seles now plays Martina Hingis, who in the day's final match defeated Arantxa Sanchex Vicario in straight sets, a complete wonder on this day

The women's quarter-finals were all played on the Court Suzanne Lenglen, Roland Garros's equivalent of Wimbeldon's number one court. It is a marvellously vibrant sporting arena, with the curved stands in perfect harmony with the women's game. But it remains a controversial decision not to allow two of these matches on to the Court Central, a far larger arena.

Croatia's Iva Majoli, the number nine seed, reached her first Grand Slam semi-final with a witheringly hard-fought victory over her doubles partner, Ruxandra Dragomir of Romania. At the end, Majoli lay flat on her back and was joined there by Dragomir after she had hauled herself wearily over the net. Synchronised collapsing.