Month: April 2011

Top two: At 1:00 PM today, Novak Djokovic will attempt to remain undefeated for the season, and Rafael Nadal will try to claim his first title of 2011.  Neither will prove to be an easy task.

The top two players in the world last met two weeks ago, in the final at Indian Wells, where Djokovic won after dropping the first set.  Today may be more favorable to Nadal, given the humid conditions in Miami and the confidence gained by a thorough drubbing of Roger Federer.

For all that, I have a hard time picking Nadal for the win.  Djokovic has been so dominant this week as to be boring.  A few bagels make news until they are so routine that you stop noticing.  The Serbian hasn’t been pushed beyond 6-4 in any set, and has dropped only 18 games in five matches.  Nadal has been impressive, as well, but the set he lost to Tomas Berdych in the quarterfinals remind us that he’s human.

The oddsmakers give Nadal a slender advantage, suggesting he has a 53% chance of winning.  I think Djokovic will triumph again–a short-lived victory, since their next meeting is likely to come on clay, where the percentages associated with Nadal will be much higher than 53%.

Challengers: In Barletta, the final will be contested today between Filippo Volandri and a surprise contender, Slovenian wild card Aljaz Bedene.  Bedene is currently ranked outside top 400, and has a career high in the 200s.  He is only 21, and appears to be coming back from an injury that kept him out of action for the entire second half of 2010.  It’s been a solid run to get him to the final, including victories over Albert Ramos and Alessio di Mauro, neither one an easy opponent on clay.

The final at St. Brieuc involves another up-and-comer, 22-year-old Frenchman Maxime Teixeira, who will face the younger, more heralded Benoit Paire.  Paire is hoping to inch a couple of spots closer to the top 100, while his opponent has more conservative goals.  A win for Paire would move him to #115, while Teixeira, who started last week at #267 and also reached the final in Marrakech, could climb as high as #189.

Finally, the Barranquilla challenger will be between two Argentines, Facundo Bagnis and Diego Junquiera.  Bagnis is yet another prospect, a 21-year-old who will break into the top 200 with his performance this week.  Bagnis shut down the persistent Flavio Cipolla in the semifinals, while Junquiera needed three sets (and two tiebreaks) to win his match with second-seeded Horacio Zeballos.

Clay already: Once the yellow fuzz is settled in Miami, our attention will turn to the clay-court season, with 250-level events in Casablanca and Houston.  The level of play will probably be higher in Casablanca, as more clay-courters will be there, but Houston is likely to host more intriguing matchups, for the very same reason.

The draws are already out; here are a few of the first-rounders in Texas:

• James Blake vs Carlos Berlocq.  As we saw last week, Berlocq isn’t even an easy win on hard courts, and he’s had a ton of success lately in clay-court challengers.
• Ryan Harrison vs Zeballos.  As I’ve said before, I’m not sure why Zeballos plays so much on clay; his game seems more versatile than that.  In any event, he wins a lot of matches against better clay-courters than Harrison.
• Grigor Dimitrov vs Rainer Schuettler.  This probably isn’t a good draw for Dimitrov.  I suspect the Bulgarian could beat a lot of guys at this tournament, but Schuettler may be too consistent for him.

In a second-round qualifying match today, veterans Ivo Karlovic and Jose Acasuso will face off.  Also in action: top qualifying seed Alex Bogomolov will play Nicholas Massu.  Paul Capdeville is also in qualies, meaning that there could be a few dangerous guys coming out of qualifying, as well.

Bookmark it: A few days ago in the comments, Olivier called my attention to this site, which updates ATP rankings live.  Very impressive.  I’m already a frequent visitor.

See you tomorrow!

Federer’s future: That was brutal.  It took barely an hour for Rafael Nadal to beat Roger Federer 6-3 6-2.  On a hard court.  It felt like Fed made about 30 unforced errors and Nadal made three.  The actual totals weren’t that bad, but they weren’t exactly good, either.

Every once in a while, Federer would play a great point, matching Nadal shot for shot through a 15 or 20-stroke rally.  But he couldn’t sustain that level.  Instead, he went for a lot of low-percentage shots, netting way too many offensive groundstrokes.  In the second set, he was a little more aggressive coming to net, but even then, the spectre of Nadal running down another return meant that he tried too much.

It may still be possible for Federer to beat Nadal on a hard court–after all, we’re not six months removed from last year’s tour finals, in which he did so–but increasingly, such a victory would require a brilliant day from Roger and a sub-standard performance from Rafa.  And Roger’s brilliant days are less frequent than they used to be.

It seems like every discussion of Federer’s fall eventually turns to tactics.  Nadal’s game makes Federer’s look inadequate or ill-advised.  And as I’ve said, last night was riddled with low-percentage attempts that might not have won him the point even if they cleared the net.  But is there another option?  Last night, Nadal seemingly went games without making an unforced error.  Fed had to serve an ace or quickly come in and make a volley winner to win the point.  Nobody can do that consistently, least of all against Rafa.

What must be particularly frustrating to Roger is that this very game, the one that is failing so clearly against Nadal and Novak Djokovic, is still making almost everybody else look bad.  The guy lost only one set in five consecutive victories against top-10 players in last year’s tour finals.  It’s possible to defeat Nadal, but it may not be possible for Federer to do so without a radical makeover of his game.

Of course, we know he’ll keep trying, and no matter how the clay court season goes, there will be a high-profile showdown (or several!) this summer or fall.  Roger may suffer some ugly losses, but he’s not going away.

Twenty-five: Djokovic made it look easy again yesterday, beating Mardy Fish 6-3 6-1.  The first set was tighter than the score suggests, especially in the handful of games before an early rain delay.  Fish was surprisingly competitive from the back of the court.  Unfortunately, he had no chance in rallies with the Serbian, and the final set was just as lopsided as the tally indicates.

Still, Fish will climb to #11 in Monday’s rankings, with an excellent chance of ascending further in the clay season.  Last year, he only won two matches on clay, so he has very few points to defend, and his seeding in the top 16 will help him improve on that.

Djokovic, of course, will face Nadal in tomorrow’s final.  Interestingly, oddsmakers have that match almost dead even, very slightly favoring Nadal.  That’s a shift from the Indian Wells final, in which they gave Djokovic a 55% chance of winning.  The thinking must be that the conditions in Miami make that much of a difference.  Or that since Djokovic lost five games to Viktor Troicki, he must be off his game.

The onion: HT.com favorite Flavio Cipolla is having a heck of a week at the challenger in Barranquilla.  In the first round, he defeated the French #6 seed Eric Prodon; after that, he went to a third-set tiebreak to beat local boy Robert Farah.  Yesterday, he once against needed a third set in getting past Martin Vassallo Arguello, who himself turned in a very solid week.

The Cipolla-Farah match got some confusing publicity over the last couple days, as it was incorrectly reported to have taken four hours and 23 minutes.  The match was delayed 40 minutes, so the actual time is under four hours.  Not record-breaking, but it’s still enough to ensure that for a few weeks, Farah will have nightmares in which a diminutive Italian scurries around the court, always getting the next ball back.

See you tomorrow!

Semifinals in place: By an unexpected route, yesterday’s two quarterfinals netting the predicted results.  Roger Federer played three lopsided games before Gilles Simon retired with a shoulder injury.  Rafael Nadal had to work much harder.

Tomas Berdych pushed Nadal to three sets –undoubtedly the best the Czech has played this week, and the first time he has won a set against Nadal for years.  Berdych’s consistency with the serve has been something of an achilles heel of late, and he failed to land more than 55% of first serves during the match.  He was more successful on first serve points than Nadal was, but he just didn’t get enough of them.

Semifinal #1: At 1:00 EST today, Novak Djokovic takes on Mardy Fish.  The sportsbooks see this one as a foregone conclusion, giving Djokovic a 90% chance of winning.  My system is more conservative, setting the probability at about 80%.  That said, the oddsmakers have been more aggressive on almost all of Djokovic’s matches over the last few weeks, and that has worked out quite nicely for them.

Fish has been a bit of an enigma to me this week.  There’s no doubting that he has scored two big wins, over Juan Martin del Potro and David Ferrer.  But I wasn’t convinced in either match that his opponent was playing his best; Fish didn’t beat the del Potro who went deep in Indian Wells, and the Ferrer of Wednesday’s second set didn’t look like a top 10 player at all.

Fish’s forehand is still a weak spot, and both Ferrer and del Potro let him get away with half-hearted defense.  Maybe I’m not giving the American enough credit–perhaps it was his game that made his last two opponents look sub-standard.  Constant net-rushing can have that effect.  But I doubt it will have any such effect on Djokovic.

Semifinal #2: Then, at 7:00 EST, it’s Nadal and Federer.  Thanks to yesterday’s match, Nadal has worked harder to get here, but I don’t think that falls in Federer’s favor.  The Swiss has had a few easy matches, notably a 6-3 6-1 drubbing of Olivier Rochus.  Yet he hasn’t demonstrated that the holes in his game–namely, consistency from the baseline–have been remedied.

Oddsmakers set this match at about 57/43 in favor of Nadal; my system gives Federer the edge at 55/45.  Their last two hard-court matchups–at last year’s finals, and at the 2009 Australian–have gone the distance.  I expect that this one will be decided in three sets as well.

Barranquilla: The most interesting challenger to this point is the tournament in Barranquilla, which I mentioned earlier in the week because Wayne Odesnik was in the draw.  The Odesnik storyline ended quickly, but that’s not all on offer.  As I noted yesterday, the tournament didn’t hand any of its wild cards to Colombians, and after two rounds, all of the local boys are gone.  That’s a disappointment, as Alejandro Falla was seeded fourth, and Robert Farah had a third-set tiebreak against Flavio Cipolla.

Instead, the event has been dominated by Argentines, five of whom are in the quarterfinals.  Notable among them is Martin Vassallo Arguello, a former top 50 player who had to qualify.  He beat top-seed Teymuraz Gabashvili in straight sets yesterday, and now he will face Cipolla in an attempt for his sixth-consecutive match win.

See you tomorrow!