Back at it: Only a day after the tournament wrapped up in Indian Wells, the qualifying tournament in Miami is underway. All 24 first-round matches took place yesterday, setting up the 12 qualifying battles for today.
A few Americans took advantage of the home soil to post good results. Tim Smyczek, who qualified last week and took Philipp Kohlschreiber to a third-set tiebreak, knocked off another higher-ranked player, beating Dudi Sela 6-1 6-4. Donald Young, himself coming off the biggest win of his career in Indian Wells, advanced past Arnaud Clement in three sets.
Less impressive were the youngsters wild-carded into qualifying. Jordan Cox won only two games against Marinko Matosevic, and Alexander Domijan lost 6-2 6-3 to Julian Reister.
The upset of the day might have been Daniel Munoz-de la Nava’s 6-2 6-2 victory over Horacio Zeballos. Munoz-de la Nava plays almost all of his matches on clay, and while Zeballos also spends plenty of time on clay, his game is more suited to faster surfaces. I saw Zeballos at U.S. Open qualifying a couple of years ago, when he first broke through into the top 100. It’s been disappointing that he hasn’t broken through since then–there’s no question he’s got the raw talent to do so.
Finally, Grigor Dimitrov got past Rik de Voest in a tight match, 6-4 7-6(2). Dimitrov was in Europe playing challengers until this week, so it will be interesting to see if he can be a factor on the bigger stage.
Meteoric Milos: Milos Raonic rose to #34 in the ATP rankings with his third-round showing in California. Assuming that Miami uses current rankings to determine seeds, it makes for some remarkable trivia. When the Miami field was first determined, the tournament used the rankings of Feb. 7, where Raonic was #84. That wasn’t good enough to make the cut–if he hadn’t been given a wild card, he would have been playing qualifying yesterday.
While the entry list is ranked far in advance, seedings are not. And after the withdrawals of David Nalbandian, Gael Monfils, and Tommy Robredo, that makes Raonic the 31st-highest ranked player in the main draw. That should give him a seed, despite not having the ranking to make the main draw just six weeks ago.
In the challengers: Cedrik-Marcel Stebe just keeps rolling. At the Pingguo challenger, Stebe advanced to the second round by defeating Alexander Kudryavtsev, 7-5 in the third set. Kudryavtsev was the 4th seed, ranked at a career high of #132. Next he’ll face Harri Heliovaara of Finland; after that, it’s a possible quarterfinal matchup with Uladzimir Ignatik, who beat Stebe in last week’s semifinals.
Not all young stars were so lucky: Evgeny Donskoy, the Russian who has had so much success of clay of late, fell in the first round in Marrakech yesterday to Martin Klizan. Klizan, a promising young player in his own right--he’s the 17th-ranked player under the age of 23–advanced to the second round easily, 6-2 6-2.
See you tomorrow!
Agreed about Zeballos. What a sweet backhand, reminds me a lot of Gaston Gaudio. He might be a later bloomer.
Also a good win for Young. Clement is always tricky and getting his feet back on the ground with solid wins is what he needs after his champagne moment against Murray.