{"id":680,"date":"2012-03-13T11:52:25","date_gmt":"2012-03-13T15:52:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heavytopspin.com\/?p=680"},"modified":"2012-03-13T11:52:25","modified_gmt":"2012-03-13T15:52:25","slug":"the-winter-of-mardy-fish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/13\/the-winter-of-mardy-fish\/","title":{"rendered":"The Winter of Mardy Fish"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday at Indian Wells, Mardy Fish<\/a> lost to Matthew Ebden<\/a>, an Australian counterpuncher barely ranked inside the top 100. \u00a0Ebden has played well since last fall, when he reached the quarters in Shanghai by beating Ryan Harrison<\/a> and Gilles Simon<\/a>, but that isn’t going to make Fish feel any better. \u00a0It’s been a disastrous few months for the American.<\/p>\n

How disastrous? \u00a0Mardy’s loss yesterday was his 10th in his last 14 matches. \u00a0In that time, he’s beaten Andreas Seppi<\/a> (by retirement), Andreas Beck<\/a>, Gilles Muller<\/a>, and Florian Mayer<\/a>. \u00a0He’s lost to Ebden, Albano Olivetti<\/a>, Alejandro Falla<\/a>, and James Blake<\/a>. \u00a0Not exactly top ten results.<\/p>\n

Looking back through his last 15 months of results<\/a>, though, it’s questionable whether he ever had what we think of as “top ten” results. \u00a0When the big four is winning everything, that leaves only crumbs for the rest, so men like Fish, Janko Tipsarevic<\/a>, and Nicolas Almagro<\/a> find themselves in the top ten simply by reaching a bunch of quarterfinals and winning a 250 or two. \u00a0It was evident at last year’s World Tour Finals: Fish, as the eight-seed, managed to take a set from both Roger Federer<\/a> and Rafael Nadal<\/a>, \u00a0but went home without a single victory. \u00a0(In addition to the elite world of the top four, there seems also to be an elite world of five-through-seven. \u00a0David Ferrer<\/a>, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, and Tomas Berdych<\/a> seem to be on a different level than everyone else, with the exception of Juan Martin Del Potro<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Fish’s most impressive results in all of 2011 were a quarterfinal at Wimbledon (he beat Berdych en route) and semis at Cincinnati and Miami. \u00a0(He beat Nadal in Cinci and Ferrer in Miami.) \u00a0It was easy to root for Mardy the comeback kid, but the number eight ranking seems to be his ceiling. \u00a0And with Tipsarevic, Del Potro, and John Isner<\/a> chasing him down, a poor performance in Miami this year could mean he’ll never reach that peak again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday at Indian Wells, Mardy Fish lost to Matthew Ebden, an Australian counterpuncher barely ranked inside the top 100. \u00a0Ebden has played well since last fall, when he reached the quarters in Shanghai by beating Ryan Harrison and Gilles Simon, but that isn’t going to make Fish feel any better. \u00a0It’s been a disastrous few … Continue reading The Winter of Mardy Fish<\/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":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-indian-wells"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680","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=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tennisabstract.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}