{"id":330,"date":"2011-05-17T20:38:41","date_gmt":"2011-05-17T20:38:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=330"},"modified":"2011-05-17T20:38:41","modified_gmt":"2011-05-17T20:38:41","slug":"updated-clay-rankings-and-roland-garros-qualifying-threats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/17\/updated-clay-rankings-and-roland-garros-qualifying-threats\/","title":{"rendered":"Updated Clay Rankings and Roland Garros Qualifying Threats"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, I wrote up a piece for ESPN.com that is supposed to run today. \u00a0I&#8217;ll post a link as soon as it&#8217;s up. \u00a0The article uses my ranking system to order the top players on clay, and of course, between last week&#8217;s deadline and this week&#8217;s publication, the ranking changed.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some gainers and losers in my system heading into the French:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Djokovic is #1. \u00a0Now that he&#8217;s beaten Nadal twice in a row, it isn&#8217;t even close. \u00a0In Rome, my system gave Rafa a slight edge; if they meet in the French Open final, it thinks Novak has a 58% chance of winning. \u00a0Oddly enough, that percentage is a little stronger on clay now than it is on hard courts, though of course Djokovic is favored on all surfaces.<\/li>\n<li>Murray is at #6, but basically tied for #5 with Soderling. \u00a0Coming into the clay season, he was outside the top ten on the surface; a couple of good results and he&#8217;s moving up the list. \u00a0If anything, his ranking underrates him, as we saw in his match against Djokovic last week.<\/li>\n<li>Richard Gasquet is #8. \u00a0He&#8217;s been going deep almost every week, and he has lost only to the best. \u00a0If I were a top-8 player, I wouldn&#8217;t want to see him in my quarter of the draw.<\/li>\n<li>A trio of disappointment: Mikhail Youzhny, Alexandr Dolgopolov, and Juan Monaco. \u00a0Three very different players, none of whom are posting any results to be proud of. \u00a0Dolgo, especially, should do better&#8211;this could have been his season to break through. They sit at #33, #37, and #41, respectively.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>Here are a handful of players who do well in my ranking system and are fighting through Roland Garros qualifying this week:<\/div>\n<div>\n<ul>\n<li>#60 Thomas Schoorel &#8212; he&#8217;s been a beast on the European challenger circuit lately, and he could make trouble for players who have yet to face the big serving of this tall lefty.<\/li>\n<li>#66 Ryan Harrison<\/li>\n<li>#71 Ilya Marchenko<\/li>\n<li>#73 Andrey Kuznetsov (he&#8217;ll play Marchenko in the second round)<\/li>\n<li>#87 Horacio Zeballos &#8212; I&#8217;ve mostly given up hope on the Argentine breaking through, but you never know.<\/li>\n<li>All between #90 and #100, all into the second round: Facundo Bagnis, Evgeny Donskoy, Cedrik-Marcel Stebe, and Federico del Bonis.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<div>As soon as the qualifiers are placed in the main draw, I&#8217;ll run a simulation for the entire tournament.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, I wrote up a piece for ESPN.com that is supposed to run today. \u00a0I&#8217;ll post a link as soon as it&#8217;s up. \u00a0The article uses my ranking system to order the top players on clay, and of course, between last week&#8217;s deadline and this week&#8217;s publication, the ranking changed. Here are some gainers &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/17\/updated-clay-rankings-and-roland-garros-qualifying-threats\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Updated Clay Rankings and Roland Garros Qualifying Threats<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,91],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-french-open","category-rankings"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}