MVN - Most Valuable Network

Miami Round-up, Saturday

Join us for the men’s Miami final! We’ll be blogging live on Sunday, April 6th, at 10am (PST)/1pm (EST)/6pm (CET). Join in and we’ll post your comments live.

For the second tournament in a row, the come-backing Mario Ancic has been involved in a three-set thriller, with both players facing match points. This time, he came out on top, and although the quality did approach what he and Juan-Carlos Ferrero approached late in the third set of their match at Indian Wells, I think Ancic will be happier with yesterday’s result, especially as it came against Andy Murray. It’s so fun watching the massive Ancic lunging and falling all over the court to stay in points. He’s better at picking up low balls than any big man I’ve seen, except, possibly, the peak-Safin. And, over-all, he has to be more athletic than any player his size other than Gael Monfils.

Monfils went out in straights against Fed today, and he managed to throw himself all over the court even more than Ancic, although, in his case, it seems more like posturing than simply an utter determination to win a given point. When I watch him splay his freakishly lithe 6′ 4″ frame all over the court, I feel like the implicit message is “I’m not going to win today, but I’m going to make it clear to everyone [especially the girls out there?] that I’m a physical phenomenon.” My main reaction to seeing Monfils now approaches anger, because of all the talent-wasters out there, he has to be the most egregious. It’s hard to remember that in his first full season on tour, ‘05, he actually had a winning record…Anyway, the right athletic giant pulled off the upset today, and I’m picking Ancic to make at least the quarters, although he’s going to have to do a lot of hard work to get through both Monaco and Davydenko.

Davydenko, himself, barely hung on in his match against Ernests Gulbis. I was disappointed that Gulbis couldn’t cash in on his match point, mainly because this kid has so much game I want to see more of him! Although the match with Davydenko was a kind of ideal, robots-who-take-it-on-the-rise encounter that was a pleasure to witness. I may be alone here, but I’ve always thought Davydenko pretty thrilling to watch at his best, and Gulbis was the perfect one to bring it out of him. That kid his going to have some big results before this season is over.

In other news, David Ferrer kept up his losing ways in his second-rounder against Thomas Johansson. Granted, it’s bad luck to draw a former Grand Slam winner–a nearly extinct breed–in your first match, and Johansson put on an absolute clinic, keeping David pinned behind the baseline with consistent depth, dead-accurate targeting of the corners, and the simple, wise tactic of hitting behind the speedy Spaniard at every possible opportunity. Ferrer, though, was giving him way to many mid-court balls to work with, doing a good imitation of Nadal at his worst, or an earlier version of himself that was not ranked fifth in the world–which he won’t be for long, if he doesn’t find a way to re-capture the aggressive mindset he showed between last year’s U.S. Open and this year’s Australian.

By contrast, fellow Spaniard Nicholas Almagro, whose dominance of last month’s South American mini-clay season has him looking like a top-five contender on the dirt this year, made what could be a first step toward establishing some hard court credentials. It’s only one match, but routining Clement, 6-2, 6-2, is not an easy thing for anyone to do on a slow hard court–I didn’t expect Almagro to win, period. Next he gets Youzhny–another match I don’t expect him to win–but with Youzhny so erratic lately, who knows?

The most unexpectedly interesting match yesterday was between Tsonga and nobody’s-favorite-veteran, Jurgen Melzer. I have nothing against Melzer, of course, and he is capable of playing some good, strategically smart tennis. I just didn’t think it would matter against Tsonga’s imposing game. But he had Jo-Willy completely out of sorts in the first set, and it was actually entertaining to see, one of the clearest examples of a veteran using every ounce of experience he’d gathered in his years on tour to exploit the weaknesses of a superior, though younger, talent. One of his chief tactics, was to take the net away from the Tsonga (anybody else think of that?), which truly seemed take the Frenchman by surprise and confuse him. The other was to bring Tsonga into net (sounds like suicide….), but exclusively to his backhand side, with low, short slices that Tsonga would invariably reach late, and be forced to try to bunt over the highest part of the net with only one hand on the racquet. I’m not sure why Tsonga was so slow in reaching these balls, but he hit about seven of them long, wide, or into the net in the first set, before finally making the distance on one fast enough to hit a two-handed pass, which he pulled up the line for the winner.

He lost that first set, though, and the real turning point in the match didn’t occur until late in the second set, with Melzer serving at 4-5, 30-30. On such an important point, Melzer decided to use the same play that had won him so many points already–the short, low slice to Tsonga’s backhand–and he hit this one better than any he had hit so far, with Tsonga reaching it so late that it was basically a reverse half-volley (on the descent instead of on the rise), and a down-the-line shot was impossible, his only hope being to scoop it up and dip it cross-court into about a six-inch target zone between the zone of the court that Melzer had covered and the doubles alley. Tsonga could barely even see what he was going for, but he was able to put the ball in just that spot, earning a set point with the world-class touch we saw in Australia and haven’t seen enough of since. It broke Melzer’s spirit, too, and gave Tsonga–maybe the ultimate momentum player–just the boost of spirits that he needed to come out in the next set and steamroll the veteran/journeyman the way I had expected him too from the start.

Tsonga just needs to get through one more match to set up the hotly anticipated fourth round meeting with Roddick. His next opponent, compatriot Julien Benneteau, somehow managed to upset Karlovic in the previous round, but Tsonga will be able to bully him with both forehand and serve, so I don’t expect him to have much trouble in that one. Roddick, for his part, was also unexpectedly taken to three sets in his first match, and also turned the match around with a no-look one-handed cross-court pass (although this one was completely behind him). Such symmetries would lead us to believe the two are, in fact, destined to meet in a couple of days, with Roddick only having to get through Ivo Minar, who he managed to defeat the one time they’ve played previously…on clay. Roddick-Tsonga would be a total popcorn-match, as Brad Gilbert likes to say, and I’m taking Tsonga to win it in three, or possibly even straights. (Oh, before I forget, the young player who took a set off Roddick, Viktor Troicki, is another Serb. Tipsarevich looked pretty strong yesterday too–that country is just inspired right now!)

The winner of Roddick-Tsonga gets Federer–if he makes it that far–although I’m calling his match tomorrow against Soderling a pick ‘em. It’s a bit of a shame, though, as I was looking forward to the all-Swiss Federer-Wawrinka match-up. Fed’s backhand may be more swan-like, but if he had Wawrinka’s one-hander he wouldn’t have lost a single match, on any surface, for the last four years. It can fight it out with Gasquet’s for the title of the best in tennis. It’s even more impossible-looking than the Frenchman’s, combining fluidity and piston-like power. His acceleration is so magnificent that watching it on TV, I always feel like someone is cutting frames out of the image during his take-back–he just explodes through the ball, and you cannot see it until it’s half-way to his opponent’s baseline with a bad-intentioned trajectory that is singular, unmistakable, and does some serious damage. I didn’t see the match, but Soderling dealt with him somehow, probably by hit flat and to the corners, like he does at his best. If he can do that against the current-form Federer, he has a good chance of getting the win.

There’s a lot to look forward to over the next few days, while today gives us many entertaining matches, like Nadal-Kiefer, Davenport-Ivanovic (I hope it’s entertaing…), Blake-Santoro (again!), Safarova-Jankovic, Malisse-Stepanek, Berdych-Ferrero, and Andreev vs. Kevin Anderson (can he keep it up?).

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 30th, 2008 at 10:33 am and is filed under Janko Tipsarevic, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Viktor Troicki, Marat Safin, Juan Monaco, Gael Monfils, Mario Ancic, Ernests Gulbis, Nicolas Almagro, Juan Carlos Ferrero, James Blake, Mikhail Youzhny, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, ATP Players, AMS Miami, David Ferrer, Richard Gasquet, Andy Murray, Andy Roddick, Nikolay Davydenko, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.