As we head into the second week of play, the top seeds continue to win.  There’s a decent chance that the top 8 seeds may reach the quarterfinals.

The first player to finish his match at the bottom half of the draw was Novak Djokovic.  He continues to have one of his easier runs to the later rounds, beating Nicolas Almagro in straight sets, 6-0 in the third set.  One key to his match was his improved first serve.  Djokovic pointed out that he’s been working on getting his serve back for nearly a year.  It’s just that it takes a while to fix these problems.

He has to be considered one of the favorites to go deep in the tournament and possibly win it.

Tomas Berdych seems to have regained the kind of form that lead him to go deep at the French Open and Wimbledon.  He said he spent the off-season working on being aggressive without making errors.  Indeed, he almost played an error-free third set, hitting over a dozen winners to two unforced errors.

It’s not that Verdasco was even playing poorly.  Berdych was just that aggressive and accurate, and took it to Verdasco in straight sets.

Finally, Roger Federer took on Tommy Robredo, a player he’s never lost to.  Robredo was not much of a factor last year.  However, his wins over Mardy Fish and Sergiy Stakhovsky show he may be ready to move back up the rankings again.

Federer won the first set handily enough, but then his strokes started going awry as he misfired on forehands and backhands.  Robredo was able to break and hold to serve for the third set.  Federer got his game together well enough to take sets three and four and make yet another quarterfinals, tying Jimmy Connors record for consecutive quarterfinals in Slams (which probably only includes Slams Connors played since Connors routinely skipped the Australian Open).

If there’s a match that might prevent the top 8 seeds from reaching the quarterfinals, it may be the Roddick’s match that’s going on right now.  He is struggling against Wawrinka, who had 9 break points against Roddick in the 4-3 game to lead 5-3.  Wawrinka has been working with Peter Lundgren, Federer’s old coach.  Wawrinka has been playing solid tennis, especially his win over Monfils.