Category: Uncategorized

When Richard Gasquet beat Kei Nishikori to reach the quarterfinals in Paris this week, he won his 50th match of the year, putting him in that rarefied company for the first time in his career.  Six years after his near-miss 49-win 2007 campaign, he finally becomes the 123rd player in the professional era to post such a total.

Given the shorter ATP schedule favored by top players these days, a 50-win season isn’t as easy to come by as it once was.  Between 1972 and 1982, there were six 100-win seasons, while no one has even played 100 matches in a season since Yevgeny Kafelnikov did so in 2000.

Gasquet is one of only six players to reach the 50-win mark this year–the others are Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, David Ferrer, Juan Martin del Potro, and Tomas Berdych, while Stanislas Wawrinka could get there with one win in London.  Six is the lowest total since 2004, when only five players reached the 50-win plateau.

Going back to the 1970s, however, the ATP sported 50-match winners in double digits every season from 1971 to 1980, peaking with 16 in 1974 and 1975.   In recent years, 10 players have reached the mark only once since 1994.

With only 123 players in ATP history, the list of 50-match winners is a select one.  Jimmy Connors tallied 50 wins 14 times, Ivan Lendl 12 times, Roger Federer 11 times, Guillermo Vilas and Stefan Edberg 10 times each.  Nadal is up to eight, while Djokovic is right behind him at seven.

The next highest active player on the list, David Ferrer, is an interesting case, especially in the context of Gasquet’s maiden 50-win season.  Aside from the stars of the early 70s, most of the biggest names in tennis posted their first 50-win campaign in their early 20s, if not sooner.  Connors and Lendl did so at 20, while Federer did so at 21.  Ferrer, on the other hand, is finishing up his fifth 50-win season, despite having none until age 25.  The only modern-era player who compares is Thomas Muster, who had four 50-win seasons, the first of which when he was 26.

Gasquet is 27, and while he’s not the only man to start tallying 50-win seasons so late, he enters an awfully small group.  Again setting aside players of the early 70s, only 12 men posted their first 50-win season at age 27 or later.  Among them are some familiar recent names, including Nicolas Almagro last year, Janko Tipsarevic the last two years, and Jurgen Melzer in 2010.  The Austrian is the record-holding oldest of the bunch, having enjoyed his 50-win campaign at age 29.

While many of us hope that this is a breakout season for Richard, these comparisons aren’t encouraging.  Of the 11 other players in this group, only two–Tipsarevic and James Blake–posted another 50-win season.  Melzer, for instance, hasn’t topped 30 since his big year.  If we are entering the Gasquet era, it will likely be a short one.

The same reasoning, alas, applies to Wawrinka, who may yet reach the 50-win plateau.  About 15 months older than the Frenchman, he would be second only to Melzer as the oldest player to register his first 50-win season.  The Ferrer comparison offers a glimmer of hope, as it is increasingly common for players to enjoy late peaks.  But if we’re seeing Gasquet or Wawrinka win 50 matches in, say, 2015 or 2016, it would be far more noteworthy than their excellent current seasons.

Stanislas Wawrinka came into his first Grand Slam semifinal match today as an extreme underdog.  (I made the case for that this morning.)  For the second consecutive Slam encounter with Novak Djokovic, he nearly scored the upset.

As was the case with Andy Murray in Wawrinka’s quarterfinal match, Djokovic didn’t look like a top-three player, especially for the first hour or so.  He dropped the first set 6-2, making way too many errors (18, against only six winners), and failing to take advantage of Stan’s complete inability to put a first serve in the box.

A few games later, the match turned even further in the direction of the Swiss.  After a marathon, 18-point game at 1-2, Wawrinka saved three break points then won a couple of long rallies in the following game to score the first break of the second set.  However, Wawrinka’s first-serve percentage caught up to him while Djokovic started to play slightly better tennis.  Novak broke to even things up at 4-4, and both players continued to hold serve into a tiebreak.

In retrospect, that second-set tiebreak was the turning point.  And if we had to isolate one point, it would be the one on Wawrinka’s racquet at 2-3, when he double faulted.  He never got the mini-break back.

The Swiss only double-faulted six times in the match–not bad for a 331-point contest–but the rough patch in that second-set tiebreak was the first of three very important points he threw away with his serve.  He double-faulted on break point in the first game of the fourth set, giving Djokovic a break he would never recover.  And at game point, 40-30, at 1-1 in the fifth, he double-faulted to give Djokovic an opportunity at deuce.

That third game of the fifth set will go down in the record books.  It lasted 30 points, progressing through twelve deuces.  Djokovic had five break points, and Stan saved them all.

At the time, it felt like a turning point.  After all, what else could a 12-deuce game be?  Looking back, it was Wawrinka’s last hurrah.

It is remarkable that Wawrinka, playing against the best returner in the game, earned the result he did.  He barely made half of his first serves, never topping 55% in a single set.  It’s remarkable, either a testament to Stan’s ground game or an indication of Djokovic’s poor play today, that he won half of those second-serve points.

And by the fifth set, his ability to play on was increasingly in question.  At 4-1 in the fourth set, Wawrinka left the court for a medical time out, getting a tape job on his upper thighs.  He clearly wasn’t moving as well after that, though the results barely show it.  Somehow he continued to fight Djokovic for every point.  He took a few more chances–including some reckless ones–but continued to slug it out in plenty of long rallies.

But in the service game following the marathon hold, Wawrinka’s magic didn’t hold.  He saved two more break points, but on the eighth chance of the set, Novak finally broke.  There wouldn’t be another chance.  From 3-2, Wawrinka continued to hold serve, but no game would reach deuce.

It was a great effort from the Swiss.  Like his straight-set win over Murray, it is, one hopes, a sign of things to come.  Save Nadal, Wawrinka has played as well as anyone this fortnight.  He’s no young rising star, but in the few years remaining in his professional career, he deserves, at the very least, another shot at a Grand Slam semifinal.

Here are the complete point-by-point stats from the match.

Last night, Novak Djokovic cemented his status as the US Open favorite, all without doing a thing.

The 32-man draw has 19 seeds left, but only two others remain in Novak’s quarter, and those two–Tommy Haas and Mikhail Youzhny–play each other in the 3rd round.  Djokovic will face the shocking Joao Sousa in his third-rounder, followed by the winner of Tim Smyczek–Marcel Granollers in the fourth.

Novak’s quarterfinal threat was supposed to be Juan Martin del Potro, and that’s where the Serbian has really gained.  Lleyton Hewitt upset Delpo in a slipshod five-setter last night, making Djokovic’s most likely QF opponent Tommy Haas. While Haas has a recent win against the world #1, you have to figure he remains the preferred opponent.

These shifts in the draw mean that my forecast now gives Djokovic almost exactly double the chances of winning of his nearest competitor, Rafael Nadal.  Nadal, of course, has a much trickier path to the semifinals, likely having to go through both John Isner and Roger Federer.  Andy Murray has a more fortunate draw than that, but he’ll probably need to beat Tomas Berdych to earn a matchup with Djokovic.

—

Djokovic didn’t look dominant in his second-round win, but it was Murray who lost a set yesterday, to journeyman Argentine Leonardo Mayer, a 26-year-old who has yet to crack the top 50.  The defending champion recovered just fine, but is second-round weakness a sign of bad things to come?

The short answer is no.  Since 1991, seven US Open champions have been pushed to four or five sets in their second round match en route to the title, though none have suffered that fate since 2004, when eventual champ Federer dropped a set to Marcos Baghdatis.  Another three titlists lost at least one set in the first round.

However, few of those early-round challengers have been as anonymous as Mayer.  Besides Baghdatis, the most recent second-round threats have been Ivan Ljubicic and James Blake.  The last time an Open champion dropped a second-round set to such an anonymous figure was in 2000, when Marat Safin needed five sets to get past Gianluca Pozzi.

Also worth noting is that in Murray’s trio of notable victories–last year’s Olympics and US Open, plus this year’s Wimbledon–he has never dropped a set so early.  In fact, in London this summer, he won his first four matches in straights before battling through a five-setter against Fernando Verdasco.

Whatever else you might say about Verdasco, he’s a much more dangerous opponent than Leonardo Mayer.

—

American grinder Tim Smyczek scored the biggest win of his career yesterday with a five-set victory over Alex Bogomolov.  Smyczek has taken advantage of an easy draw (Bogie defeated Benoit Paire in the first round) to reach his first Grand Slam round of 32 in his fifth main draw appearance.

He has a rare opportunity to go even further, facing 43rd-ranked Marcel Granollers, also the beneficiary of a friendly draw thanks to Fabio Fognini‘s first-round loss.  Granollers has played 18 slams on hard and grass courts, never reaching the round of 16.

It’s a strange world when Smyczek is one of only three Americans–along with John Isner and Jack Sock–still alive.  Stranger still is the very real possibility that Tim will be the only man standing two days from now.  Sock faces Janko Tipsarevic, a winnable match but not one he’ll be favored in.  Isner is ranked higher than his next opponent, Philipp Kohlschreiber, but the German eliminated him in last year’s Open.

Smyczek, on the other hand, has nothing to lose.  Well, except for his pride, when he reaches the fourth round and suffers a triple-bagel at the hands of Novak Djokovic.

—

If you’re already worrying about not having enough matches to watch during week two, look no further than Colette Lewis’s thorough US Open Juniors preview, which lays out the contenders in both the boys’ and girls’ draw.

17-year-old Victoria Duval, she of six career tour-level matches, upset 2011 champion and 11th seed Samantha Stosur last night.  Leave it at that, and it sounds pretty impressive.

But it doesn’t quite convey how impressive the youngster’s path to the second round has been.  Duval is ranked just inside the top 300–not high enough to get into the qualifying tournament on that basis.  Armed with a wild card, she beat three players, each with considerably more experience than she has.

Reaching a Grand Slam main draw as a qualifying wild card is notable in and of itself.  The only one of this year’s nine qualie WCs to reach the main draw, she’s only the 16th woman to do so at the US Open since 1998 and only the 31st woman to do so at any Slam in that time frame.

As we now know, she didn’t stop there, and that sets her further apart.  Of the 30 women who previous accomplished the feat, only 11 went on to win a match in the main draw.  (Only one of those, Great Britain’s Karen Cross, at Wimbledon in 1997, won two main draw matches.)  And only one of those ladies–Yulia Fedossova, who qualified for the US Open in 2006–beat a seed.  Her victim was the much less imposing 25th seed, Anabel Medina Garrigues.

Every slam has its share of upsets, but this one goes far beyond that.  By beating a former champion and highly-seeded player, Duval did something no woman had done before.

—

Yesterday was a good day for American men, who went 5-2.  The only victims were Steve Johnson, who struggled with injuries, and junior champion Collin Altamirano, who no one could’ve expected would give Philipp Kohlschreiber much of a fight.

More notable than the simple fact of winning was the manner in which two US men did so.  In the battle of opposites, John Isner defeated Filippo Volandri, 6-0 6-2 6-3, and Donald Young knocked out Martin Klizan, 6-1 6-0 6-1.

Isner set all kinds of personal records in the process.  Not known for his return game–to put it mildly–Isner had never won a bagel set on hard courts.  In fact, until beating Adrian Mannarino in Newport last month, he had never won a set of professional tennis 6-0.

Next, also because of that not-so-pesky return game, Isner tends to lose quite a few games, even when he’s winning.  In best-of-five matches, he had never before won a match without dropping at least nine games.  (That was at the French in 2010, when he beat Andrey Golubev.)  Today he won while giving up only five.

Finally, to reach such a scoreline, Isner broke serve a total of six times.  That’s something else he’s never done before.  He’s broken five times on a handful of occasions, but never six, unless he did so in Davis Cup, for which stats are more difficult to come by.

Still, it seems likely that Klizan played worse than Volandri did.  As you might imagine, Klizan has never lost quite so comprehensively, though he did turn in a similarly abysmal performance in New York three years ago, when he lost to Juan Carlos Ferrero, 6-1 6-3 6-0.

For Young, it was only his third straight-set victory at a slam, regardless of lopsidedness.  And it was only the third time he won a Grand Slam match having earned his way into the main draw.  His other five wins–all at the US Open–came as a wild card.

—

Since we’re talking about all these Americans winning in New York, it seems like a great time to point you toward Colin Davy’s recent effort to quantify home-court advantage in tennis.  He finds that home-country players–both men and women–have a slight advantage that cannot be explained by other factors, to the tune of about 2%.

In building jrank, I’ve done some work along the same lines, and arrived at a similar number.  (On my old blog, I posted some very crude attempts, not controlling for things like surface, and claimed a much bigger effect.  I don’t think I’ve published the details of my more recent efforts.)

As Colin notes, it’s a small effect compared to other sports. (Isner’s love of the USA notwithstanding.)  To the extent home-court advantage in tennis stems from officiating bias–a common cause in other sports–the increasing use of Hawkeye would seem to lessen the effect.  And oddly, the practice of putting local players on main courts would turn out to be counterproductive.  By putting locals on Hawkeye courts, you’re taking away at least one slight advantage.

Colin also suggests comparing different stages of the tournament, which may reveal that umpires have a greater or lesser bias as the stakes get higher.  That test occurred to me for a different reason.  Travel-related fatigue is a major factor (again, something Colin acknowledges), but it is one that would likely lessen as the tournament goes on.  A player might still be jetlagged for his first-round match, but if he wins a couple of rounds, that effect is likely gone.

It’s an interesting field of study, one that is particularly tricky to separate from others–such as travel effects, surface preferences, venue familiarity, and so on.  As is so often the case in tennis, it is a topic that has been extensively hashed out for other sports, yet barely researched in ours.

—

In case you missed it yesterday afternoon, I tracked every point of the Federer-Zemlja match, and came up with some very detailed serve breakdowns for each player.  Check it out.

This post has been withdrawn due to a mistake in the calculations that seriously affects its conclusions.  I am leaving this note here to avoid breaking the link.  Look on the bright side–on this site, there’s plenty of tennis analysis in which the mistakes have less serious effects.

Yesterday in the Delray Beach semifinals, Edouard Roger-Vasselin and Ernests Gulbis upset the top two seeds, John Isner and Tommy Haas.  Both are ranked outside the top 100, meaning that the final in Florida will be contested by two players who started the event far outside of contention.

As with most “gee whiz”-type tennis events, it’s not the first time.  In fact, there have been at least 59 ATP events since the inception of the ranking system in which both finalists were outside the top 100.  (I don’t have ranking data for 1982, so there may be more.)

However, this is the first such final since 2007, when the Houston final was contested between Ivo Karlovic and Mariano Zabaleta.  As you’ll see in the overall list, these finalists skew toward the Gulbis’s more than the Roger-Vasselins–while such players might have gone through injury or slumps, they often reached a much higher level at some other time.

Newport has been the most common scene of these sorts of finals.  Eight times in the event’s history has the final been played between two men outside of the top 100.  In fact, four of the last nine such finals have been at Newport.

Finally, these finals have become progressively rarer as the number of events on the ATP calendar shrinks and more top players compete in a higher percentage of ATP events.  (Even Delray Beach, this week notwithstanding.)  There were (at least) 25 finals like this in the 1980s, 17 in the 1990s, 10 in the 2000s, and so far just one in the 2010s.

Click here for a list of all of these finals.

It’s been an exciting couple of months in tennis, and Milos Raonic has gotten lost in the shuffle.  He hasn’t beaten a top-40 player since Barcelona in April, and he remains outside of the top 20.  His five-set battle at Wimbledon against Sam Querrey was a high-class, hard-fought effort on both sides, and naturally, Querrey got most of the press after that one.

This isn’t a sophomore slump.  It’s the calm before the storm.

Much like Juan Martin del Potro, Raonic has been stunted in 2012 by the juggernaut that has been Roger Federer.  Of Raonic’s 10 losses this year, three have come against Roger, and all three have gone three sets, two of them to a third-set breaker.

More importantly, Raonic’s ranking doesn’t tell the whole story.  The Canadian missed almost the entire second half of 2011, coming back after the US Open at half-strength.  He has almost no points to defend between now and the end of the year.

Even a modest projection for Raonic suggests that he’ll move into the top 16 by the end of the year.  And as he climbs the ladder, he’ll get better seedings, avoiding roadblocks like Federer in the 2nd round of Madrid.

If all Milos does is play up to his seed at this year’s three remaining Masters, reach the third round of the US Open, and defend his semifinal points from Stockholm, he’ll ascend to approximately #17 in the rankings.  (I’ve ignored the Olympics, since that event will inflate almost everyone’s point total.  Raonic may also further pad his total this week at Newport.)  One decent run, like a Masters quarterfinal, a 500 semifinal, or even a fourth-round finish in Flushing, puts him at the edge of the top 15.  Based on his skill level, that’s where he belongs right now.

And that conservative path is almost certainly not all that the Canadian will accomplish.  On paper, his grass season is a bit disappointing, but a three-set loss to Federer and the five-setter against the resurgent Querrey is hardly a disaster.  And Raonic’s clay season exceeded expectations, including wins over Nicolas Almagro, Andy Murray, and David Nalbandian.

A couple of rough draws have made it easy to forget about one of the game’s future stars.  Don’t be surprised to see him persistently climbing the rankings, pushing aside top-tenners, for the rest of the 2012 season.

 

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen some overall serving trends–how righties and lefties perform in the deuce and ad courts, and how successful they are at specific point scores.

The tour-wide results are interesting enough, but there’s much more to discover at the individual player level. Because point-by-point data is only available for 2011 grand slam matches, only a few players have had enough points tracked to allow us to make meaningful conclusions. Fortunately, those are the best players in the game, and there’s plenty to discover.

Let’s start with Novak Djokovic. Much of his success seems to stem from rock-solid consistency: he can attack when returning almost as much as most players do on serve; he is strong on both forehand and backhand, and he rarely shows signs of mental weakness. If there is a player who doesn’t display the typical differences between deuce and ad courts and various point scores, it would seem to be Djokovic.

The first table shows the frequency of different outcomes in the deuce court, in the ad court, and on break point, relative to Djokovic’s average. For instance, the 1.018 in the upper left corner means that Djokovic wins 1.8% more points than average in the deuce court.

OUTCOME       Deuce     Ad  Break  
Point%        1.018  0.980  0.975  
                                   
Aces          1.117  0.869  1.046  
Svc Wnr       1.101  0.886  0.865  
Dbl Faults    1.176  0.802  1.102  
1st Sv In     1.028  0.968  1.081  
                                   
Server Wnr    1.027  0.970  0.815  
Server UE     0.973  1.030  0.941  
                                   
Return Wnr    0.972  1.031  2.125  
Returner Wnr  0.832  1.189  1.487  
Returner UE   0.927  1.082  1.092  
                                   
Rally Len     0.938  1.070  1.184 

There are some huge differences here. Given the gap between deuce and ad results for many types of outcomes, it’s surprising that Novak wins so many ad-court points. He hits nearly 12% more aces in the deuce court, suggesting that even when he doesn’t hit an ace or service winner, he better sets up the point. Returners are much more likely to hit winners against him in the ad court, and the point requires more shots.

There are even more extreme numbers on break point. It’s unclear from the numbers whether Djokovic consistently goes for more on the serve on break point–more aces, fewer service winners, more double faults, but more first serves in–but it appears he plays much more gingerly, hitting far fewer winners and allowing opponents to hit more than twice as many return winners than average.

Next, this is how he performs on a point-by-point basis. Win% shows what percentage of points he wins at that score; Exp is how many he would be expected to win (given how he performs in each match), and Rate is the difference between the two. A rate above 1 means he plays better on those points; below 1 is worse.

SCORE   Pts   Win%    Exp  Rate  
g0-0    360  70.0%  70.2%  1.00  
g0-15   107  65.4%  68.5%  0.96  
g0-30    37  59.5%  66.5%  0.89  
g0-40    15  66.7%  64.8%  1.03  
                                 
g15-0   248  66.5%  71.0%  0.94  
g15-15  153  69.9%  69.9%  1.00  
g15-30   68  67.6%  68.1%  0.99  
g15-40   32  68.8%  66.7%  1.03  
                                 
g30-0   165  67.3%  71.3%  0.94  
g30-15  161  70.2%  70.4%  1.00  
g30-30   94  77.7%  67.9%  1.14  
g30-40   43  62.8%  66.4%  0.95  
                                 
g40-0   111  73.9%  72.0%  1.03  
g40-15  142  76.8%  71.3%  1.08  
g40-30  106  67.0%  68.6%  0.98  
g40-40  104  72.1%  66.8%  1.08  
                                 
g40-AD   29  69.0%  66.2%  1.04  
gAD-40   75  70.7%  67.0%  1.05  

It appears that Djokovic’s caution on break point isn’t hurting him; despite losing a point or two more than expected at 30-40, he gets it back at 40-AD. Novak excels most in the pressure points: 30-30 and 40-40, with strong showings at nearly every point from 30-30 on, with the exception of 30-40–which may just be a fluke–we only have 43 points to work with.

We can go through the same exercises for Djokovic’s return points. The next two tables are trickier to read. Look at them as Serving against Djokovic. Thus, the number in the upper-left corner means that when serving against Djokovic, players win 1% more points than average in the deuce court.

(I’ve excluded return points against lefty servers, including Nadal. Since lefties and righties have such different serving tendencies, limiting the sample to righty servers gives us clearer results, even as the sample shrinks a bit.)

OUTCOME       Deuce     Ad  Break  
Point%        1.010  0.989  1.023  
                                   
Aces          1.024  0.974  1.091  
Svc Wnr       0.998  1.002  1.105  
Dbl Faults    0.994  1.007  0.986  
1st Sv In     1.055  0.940  0.957  
                                   
Server Wnr    1.002  0.998  1.091  
Server UE     0.987  1.015  0.964  
                                   
Return Wnr    1.123  0.867  0.849  
Returner Wnr  0.895  1.114  1.124  
Returner UE   0.858  1.153  1.069  
                                   
Rally Len     0.992  1.009  0.959  

It seems that Novak goes big on the return in the deuce court, but tries to do more later in ad-court points. The break point tendencies may speak to other players’ fear of Djokovic’s return game: They go bigger with their serve, hitting more aces and service winners, and severely limiting Novak’s return winners. In the end, though, it doesn’t matter: he converts the break points anyway.

Here’s more on Djokovic’s return game, again with numbers from the perspective of players serving against him.

SCORE   Pts   Win%    Exp  Rate  
g0-0    346  58.7%  56.3%  1.04  
g0-15   143  53.1%  55.1%  0.96  
g0-30    67  52.2%  53.9%  0.97  
g0-40    32  53.1%  53.0%  1.00  
                                 
g15-0   198  62.1%  57.2%  1.09  
g15-15  151  54.3%  56.0%  0.97  
g15-30  104  45.2%  54.7%  0.83  
g15-40   74  59.5%  53.4%  1.11  
                                 
g30-0   123  60.2%  58.1%  1.04  
g30-15  131  51.9%  56.9%  0.91  
g30-30  110  60.0%  56.0%  1.07  
g30-40   88  54.5%  54.3%  1.00  
                                 
g40-0    74  64.9%  59.0%  1.10  
g40-15   94  61.7%  57.5%  1.07  
g40-30  102  53.9%  57.2%  0.94  
g40-40  189  50.8%  55.4%  0.92  
                                 
g40-AD   93  54.8%  54.3%  1.01  
gAD-40   96  55.2%  56.4%  0.98  

While Djokovic excels at deuce (servers should win 55.4% of those points; they manage to win only 50.8%), the reverse happens at 30-30. There aren’t many clear trends here, which may simply attest to Djokovic’s return dominance, regardless of point score.

Open quarters: Of the eight men left standing in Barcelona, five are seeded in the top eight.  The other three are unseeded, but only one needed to pull a major upset to get to the quarters.

That man is Ivan Dodig, who took out Robin Soderling in the 2nd round, allowing the Swede only six games.  It’s been a breakthrough season for the Croatian, who will crack the top 50 thanks to his performance this week.  He backed up the 2nd-round win with a tough three-setter against Milos Raonic today.  Perhaps most impressive, he reeled off seven points in a row to win a first-set tiebreak.

Dodig has an opportunity to go even further, as the man seeded to face him in the quarters was Tomas Berdych, who withdrew.  Instead, his next opponent is Feliciano Lopez, who defeated Kei Nishikori today, after upsetting Guillermo Garcia-Lopez yesterday.  Thus, at least one semifinalist will be unseeded.

That man will almost certainly face Rafael Nadal in the semis.  Nadal, as goes without saying, breezed through his match today against Santiago Giraldo–if anything, it’s surprising that he failed to win 60% of total points.  Nadal’s quarterfinal opponent is Gael Monfils, who won in straight sets over Richard Gasquet–a positive result for Monfils, who just scraped by Robin Haase in the second round.

Predictions: There aren’t betting lines yet for all of the quarterfinals, but I have run my algorithm to get percentages for tomorrow’s four matches:

• Nadal vs. Monfils: Oddsmakers have the Frenchman at 30-1, which seems excessive to me.  Yes, of course, Rafa is the heavy favorite, and yes, of course, Gael could self-destruct and play no better than Giraldo did today.  But on the other hand, Monfils is one of the few men with a game that could–if the stars aligned exactly right–beat Nadal on clay.  My system gives Gael a 20% chance, which as I’ve commented before, is just a reflection of how my system doesn’t know what to do with someone so surface-dominant as Nadal.
• Dodig vs. Lopez: After beating Soderling, Dodig will no doubt gain several places in my ranking system, but that won’t happen until next Monday.  As it is now, my algorithm isn’t too impressed, especially with Dodig’s potential on clay.  It gives Feliciano a 64% chance of reaching the semis.
• Jurgen Melzer vs. David Ferrer: Even after Melzer’s impressive victory over Roger Federer last week, Ferrer is still the favorite here.  I have him at 60.5%, while early sportsbook odds set him at 77%.
• Nicholas Almagro vs. Juan Carlos Ferrero: It’s nice to see Ferrero right back in the mix, even if it took some good fortune to get him there.  In fact, he just barely got by Simone Vagnozzi today, a result that must have Almagro licking his lips in anticipation.  Early sportsbook odds have Almagro at 78%, while my system puts him at 70%.

Streaking southpaw: Thomas Schoorel isn’t letting up–after winning a title last week, he hasn’t lost a set this week, including his opening-round upset of Jeremy Chardy.  Tomorrow he’ll face 5th-seed Ivo Minarin the semis.

Another man to watch on the challenger tour is Aljaz Bedene, the Slovenian who won his first title at this level three weeks ago in Barletta.  Last week he reached the semifinals in Blumenau, and he’s in another quarter in Santos, where he’ll next face 5th-seed Diego Junquiera.

See you tomorrow!