Since I missed Day 4, let's recap. The top seeds, Roger Federer and Andy Murray, had few problems. Despite Davydenko recently reaching the Doha finals, this Davydenko was not the same as 2010 who was fresh off a win at London in 2009 and was in the top ten. Federer had too many answers for
Brian Baker, who spent 6 years, in and out of surgery, then had the Cinderella story of 2012 where he made the finals of Nice and did reasonably well at Wimbledon and the French Open, was winning his 2nd round match against Sam Querrey when he was recovering for a shot, and his knee buckled,
Technically, it wasn't an upset. After all, Julien Benneteau, the wily French veteran that pushed Federer to 5 sets last year at Wimbledon, was the 32nd seed, not the young Bulgarian, Grigor Dimitrov. Never mind that Benneteau reached the semis of Sydney, so he had a good tournament, but Dimitrov reached the finals of Brisbane,
The big question, heading into the Australian Open, with Nadal out due to a stomach virus, is which half Andy Murray, the number 3 seed, would fall. He's in Federer's half. This puts David Ferrer, the fourth seed, in Djokovic's half. Things aren't all rosy for the top seeds. The high seed for Djokovic in
Hopman Cup Let's start with an exo, only because I caught the tail-end of this. This is like a mini-Davis Cup. One man. One woman. Two singles. One mixed doubles. The finalists, this year, were Spain and Serbia. Of course, with Novak Djokovic, Serbia won the men's singles. Anabel Medina Garrigues then won a touch
With the start of the new year, the tennis cycle starts afresh. It was only about 6 weeks ago that the last official ATP event was played, namely, the Davis Cup finals. Since then, some players have used the extra time for exhibitions. Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, Juan Martin del Potro, and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga were
I'm not the kind of person that likes to predict Slams. These tend to be "wish for" exercises. You never know when, say, Rafael Nadal will get injured, and then all your Slam predictions go bye-bye. Instead, I'll try to look at the form of the top few players. Novak Djokovic 2011 was a great
You know, it started as well as Federer could hope. He was hitting awesome, got an early break, and it looked like all the good play from beating Murray would carry over to Djokovic. But, just as he's accomplished similar feats against Nadal, his opponent, this time Djokovic, clawed his way back, some based on
Well, it's come down to number 1 (Djokovic) and number 2 (Federer) in the year-end finals. Some had hoped that del Potro would have come all the way back and challenge the top players. However, Djokovic (and Murray, for that matter) had a good record against del Potro even when del Potro was at his
Djokovic still looks like the odds-on favorite to win the year-end championship. With Roger Federer still struggling with serve and Murray have dropped a match to the Serb, Djokovic was looking to finish his group undefeated. Djokovic took the first set rather comfortably at 62. He attributed this to some poor serving by Berdych which
