Due to an amazing match between Italy’s Flavia Pennetta and Russia’s Vera Zvonareva, the Murray-Dent match got a late start. Pennetta saved 6 match points, almost everyone on aggressive winners showing the kind of mental toughness that often seems in short supply in the women’s tour. Zvonareva, meanwhile was going through an emotional roller coaster. Mere points from winning the match comfortably in straight set, Zvonareva argued with the umpire, fidgeted with her taped knees, eventually ripping pieces of it off, while Pennetta rolled to a 6-0 third set win, putting an exclamation to the first Italian woman to ever reach the top 10.
Those hoping the Murray-Dent match would be just as exciting were in for a bit of a shock. On paper, this shouldn’t have been that close of a match. However, Dent’s got a huge serve, and is an oddity on the tour, playing serve and volley. He hits aggressive shots to get him to net. He hit an outrageous 121 winners in his five set win over Ivan Navarro in the second round.
Andy Murray is one of those guys that leave people scratching their heads. How does he win? He does several things quite well. First, he’s beefed up his serve. He can now get great pace on the first serve, and this allows him to get cheap points on his own serve. His second serve is still a liability. He can sometimes kick one in at 80 mph. Second, Murray is perhaps the best returner in the game. He and Nadal lead serve return stats. In particular, he put 90% of returns in play, giving Dent few free points.
Finally, Murray has worked on his movement for the last two years. He anticipates extremely well. Dent had to hit drop shots and drop volleys and while Murray had some issues chasing some of these shots down, he was often close to getting these shots. Since Dent isn’t the best baseliner (even serve-and-volleyers have to have decent groundstrokes these days, unlike the past, where your groundies could be a huge liability, but you could get away with it by rushing to net as fast as you could), he found himself missing shots because Murray moves the ball around well. Murray mixes paces and spins better than anyone on tour.
Murray is still vulnerable to the hot big-hitter, but against Dent, he had an emphatic win, one that reinforces the idea that he’s one of the top 3-4 favorites to win the tournament.
Nadal’s match was apparently worse than the score would indicate. Nadal had his abs taped up, and was broken numerous times by the adventuresome Nicolas Almagro. Nadal would have been eliminated if Almagro also didn’t have a bunch of trouble holding his own serve. Consider that Almagro broke Nadal 3 times in the first set and still lost 7-5. That means Nadal broke Almagro 4 times. There were 7 breaks of serve in the first set. The second and third set had 3 breaks of serve each. This isn’t good enough for Nadal especially if he plays a big server.
There are two great matches in the fourth round. Gael Monfils will take on Rafael Nadal. Monfils is an amazing athlete who moves as well as anyone, and yet looks so strange on court. He’s called Sliderman and Rubberman for his unusual contortions. Even so, Nadal leads their head-to-head 4-1 and one wonders about his mental toughness. Monfils’ countryman, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, takes on Fernando Gonzalez in what promises to be a hard-hitting match. Tsonga is more talented, hitting a wider variety of shots. However, Gonzalez is a huge rhythm player. When he’s hitting his forehand well, it’s perhaps the most awesome shot in the game. The two have never played each other at the pro level.
A little surprisingly, the last American standing is John Isner. With his surprising defeat of Andy Roddick, he’ll take on Fernando Verdasco. Verdasco just came off a victory over Isner’s doubles partner, Sam Querrey, in the finals of New Haven. Verdasco has had tough times with big servers. He has a 1-3 record against Ivo Karlovic. Isner came to net numerous times. He may try to employ a similar strategy to beat Verdasco.
The two play later today on Day 8 (Labor Day Monday) of the US Open.
