Roddick suffering: In sixteen matches yesterday, seven were upsets, with a seeded player losing to an unseeded one. The most extreme of the seven was Pablo Cuevas’s defeat of Andy Roddick.
Roddick was clearly hurting, seeing the trainer three times. Still, he put up a good fight, allowing only one break of serve and pushing Cuevas to a second-set tiebreak. For his part, the Uruguayan served even better than his opponent, launching 15 aces.
Andy won the tournament last year, so the hit to his ranking will be enormous. He’ll drop into the mid-teens, and given his usual lack of success on clay, it could be months before he gets back in the top ten. It’s really a shame that after all the work he has put in reinventing his game, and the handful of great results he’s gotten from the effort, that he’s struggled as much as he has lately just to stay on the court.
Open quarters: Roddick’s loss creates a big opportunity for three other guys. In the third round, Cuevas will face Gilles Simon; also in the quarter are Philipp Petzschner and Janko Tipsarevic, each of whom scored a straight-set upset, over Jurgen Melzer and Marin Cilic, respectively. That leaves Simon as the only seeded player in that part of the draw, and the slight favorite to made it to a quarterfinal with Roger Federer.
An even more wide open section is the quarter that was meant to be Andy Murray’s. Murray fell to Alex Bogomolov, and Pablo Andujar took out Fernando Verdasco. That leaves John Isner as the presumptive quarterfinal matchup for Novak Djokovic. Today, Isner will play Bogomolov, and Andujar will play Kevin Anderson, author of yet another upset on Friday against Guillermo Garcia-Lopez.
Finishing the second round: As I’ve mentioned, seven seeded players went down yesterday. A few of those were easily forseeable: Feliciano Lopez over Juan Ignacio Chela, Florian Mayer over Albert Montanes, and Olivier Rochus over Marcos Baghdatis.
The real surprise of the tournament has been some clay-court specialists, the sort of guys who sit in the bottom half of the top 100, show up at slams and 1000-level events, but rarely win a match. I’ve been dismissive of Carlos Berlocq–rightfully so, I still think, because he has virtually no success on hard courts in his pro career. Yet he upset Ernests Gulbis yesterday to earn a berth in the third round.
Berlocq’s opponent tomorrow, Tomas Berdych, had a scare against another clay-courter, Ruben Ramirez Hidalgo. The Czech came through, but only after dropping a set to the Spaniard.
And then there’s Andujar. His track record coming into the tournament was little better than Berlocq’s, yet he has defeated both Bernard Tomic and Verdasco. The conditions in Miami are said to be closer to a clay event than the typical hard-court tournament, and based on the results so far, that seems to be the case.
Today: For the third round, we’re looking at a lot of tight matches. In fact, Djokovic vs. Blake is the only truly lopsided contest. Sportsbook odds suggest that four of the eight matches on today’s schedule are 60/40 or closer.
The highlight is Robin Soderling vs. Juan Martin del Potro. Both men had to fight through three-setters to get this far, Soderling against Ivan Dodig and del Potro against Philipp Kohlschreiber. They’ve only played each other three times; the last head-to-head encounter was in the 2009 tour finals, where del Potro won a semifinal match in a third-set tiebreak.
Also of interest is David Ferrer vs. Somdev Devvarman. I didn’t give the Indian much of a chance against Milos Raonic, and he proved me wrong. I have to imagine that Ferrer will have an answer for anything Devvarman offers; neither player does a lot of attacking, and Ferrer’s better than just about anybody on the defense.
With Roddick out, all of the Americans in the draw are in the bottom half, meaning they are all in action today. In another potential highlight, Mardy Fish takes on Richard Gasquet. And another one of the near-even tilts is between Sam Querrey and Viktor Troicki. No matter how pessimistic you are about U.S. chances, though, rest assured that either Isner or Bogomolov will advance to the fourth round.
See you tomorrow!