Meredith Vieira gave Roger Federer a shove this morning.

Savvy tennis fans may have realized something strange about NBC's coverage of the French Open semifinal tennis match between Federer and Nikolay Davydenko: it looked live, but it really wasn't.

The two players faced off at 9 a.m. ET this morning, but NBC didn't begin its coverage until after 10 a.m., showing the match from the beginning.

In years past, most viewers probably would never have known the difference, but in an age of live online updates, it's easy to find an up-to-the-minute score. By the time NBC began their coverage, many fans would have discovered that Federer and Davydenko were already in a third-set tiebreaker.

NBC spokeswoman Alana Russo, who said she had received a handful of viewer comments about the not-so-live match, explained the network did not want the match to pre-empt the Today Show, the most popular morning show on television.

Furthermore, she said NBC really had no power to move the match back an hour or so, since Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic were scheduled to play on the same court after Federer and Davydenko were done. (Start the matches any later than 2 p.m. Paris time, and you're running out of daylight.)

This weekend's Men's and Women's finals will definitely be shown live and in their entirety.