Tournament Wrap-Up: The Winners in Umag, Gstaad and Los Angeles

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Umag

Winner: Nikolay Davydenko (d. Juan Carlos Ferrero)

What a tournament and what a performance it has been for Nikolay Davydenko this week in Umag, particularly in his two closing matches against Jurgen Melzer and Juan Carlos Ferrero. The Russian will surely take a huge confidence boost from his performances, but will he be able to translate a good run of form on clay to good form on the hardcourts? Maybe not initially, but he has plenty of time to gear up for the US Open.

Watching Davydenko play, I felt the same kind of helplessness that both Melzer and Ferrero felt, that’s how dominant he was. Out of all the players on tour, I’d have to rank Davydenko up there as quite possibly one of the most frustrating to play against, due to the sheer rapid pace of his game. He doesn’t give his opponents room to breathe, to play the shots that they’d like to play. So what you often see instead is silly shot selection, doing anything to stay one step ahead of Davydenko rather than reacting to what he does. And I sympathise completely with them, because when Davydenko’s playing like this, he’s close to unbeatable.

There is virtually no way of winning points against him, he dominates the baseline rallies and his return of serve is one of the best. He doesn’t really care what you throw at him, he’s going to be up for the task and return it with interest. He’s relentless. I think what made it great was that he didn’t allow his opponents to do anything. They weren’t even allowed to have a great day, to play out of their skins. Melzer won 2 games against Davydenko, and Ferrero lost 9 games in a row to lose the match.

Davydenko didn’t start off in imperious form. He was erratic but you could tell he was searching for his form. Being ambitious in his shot selections trying to pull off the same kind of shots as he did against Melzer the previous day. It was obvious that he had a lot of belief in his game. Initially it seemed like Ferrero would be able to put up a better fight, given that he is better equipped to deal with a fast paced game than Melzer was. Better at counterpunching and redirecting shots, being able to create opportunities for himself. But the more Davydenko started to clean up his game, the more Ferrero started to be fighting an uphill battle.

Gstaad

Video Clips: First set | Second set tie-break / Presentation

Winner: Thomaz Bellucci (d. Andreas Beck)

We were guaranteed a first time ATP title winner in the final, and it ended up being Thomaz Bellucci who had taken the more impressive scalps during the week, including a win over top seed and home favourite, Stanislas Wawrinka as well as Igor Andreev in the semi-final. It was a rare match between two left-handers, and one which featured two players with similar strengths, serve and forehand.

Bellucci is a more complete player, and also more consistent. I like how he constructs his service games with purpose, going after his serve but also using it to create gaps in the court and finishing off points in an efficient manner. It was a different match to the semi-final match against Andreev, with Bellucci not finding himself being pushed behind the baseline as much and therefore having more opportunities to attack and hit those faster-paced groundstrokes. He really has a nicely balanced game. It looks high percentage and aggressive at the same time.

Beck on the other hand is rarely consistent, not even in his match wins. You can pretty much expect that his standard of play will wildly fluctuate, but maybe that his serve will hold it all together which is what happened here and in his semi-final match. Against Daniel, he had brief moments of the match where he’d unleash a couple of big, forceful shots and that’s what won him the match. But in the final, Bellucci was equally as dominant on serve, creating a lot of problems for Beck with the lefty swinging serve and being more consistent in other areas.

Beck had a poor start to the match, broken on his opening game and wasn’t able to capitalise on a loss of concentration from Bellucci straight after the rain delay midway in the second set. Bellucci entered this event as a qualifier and after this week’s great run makes a big ranking jump from 119 to 66 which should allow him main entry into far more events.

Los Angeles

Video Clips : First set | Second set | Third set | Ending / Trophy presentation

Winner: Sam Querrey (d. Carsten Ball)

Querrey played a great match in the semi-finals against Haas, showing some of the most impressive retrieving abilities that I'd seen from him. He was fired up, and surely his Samurai supporters (pictured above) helped with that. There was one point late in the second set with Querrey scampering all over the court, hitting this really nice one-handed backhand flick from behind to stay in the point, then sprinting to the other side to recover and hit a great crosscourt forehand. It's in the video here.

The pressure was on Querrey to back up that performance against Haas, but more importantly to finally win one of those finals he was strongly favoured to win. I think if he had lost this one, we would have safely pegged him as a finals midget but after two close sets, Querrey ran away with the match when Ball ended up being too fatigued to put up anything resembling a fight. It was a strange match. Despite both players possessing great serves, they exchanged numerous breaks of serve throughout the first two sets and had terrible second serve winning percentages.

Querrey really struggles with his serve when he’s tight. It’s amazing that his big weapon, the serve just looks like a loopy shot that seems to sit up for ages, like the worst kind of second serves. I think because it’s based so much on his loose arm action to get that racquet head speed, whereas if it was a dynamic service action, like a natural way of leaning into the shot then the power would take care of itself. It was difficult to assess the rest of his game, given that Ball is such a streaky player that it can’t really be compared to playing against Haas. He’s not going to let Querrey put together great points, more or less ending it on his own terms.

Ball is as much of an outright aggressive player as you’ll see. He doesn’t hit the ball completely flat but generates massive amounts of power, I guess because of his size. You can tell why he’s ranked where he is, because he can be really careless with the simple shots, putting away midcourt balls that were practically set up for him by his big serve. And his volleying technique is suspect as well, not being clinical with the high volleys like he should be.

But it must be said that his serve is an amazing stroke, not to mention that I also find it one of the most aesthetically pleasing serves on tour. It’s a big lefty serve. It has power, kick and sidespin, swinging increasingly further out of reach after its initial bounce. It’s like Chris Guccione’s serve with more spin, but less variety since it’s more of the same thing with each delivery. Perhaps it’s better to simply watch the video itself.

I really believed that Ball would be favourite in the third set, given the strength of his own serving, and how he often punished Querrey’s serve late in the second set. But Ball surrendered his first break of serve with some of the most horrendous shots I’d seen. Soon afterwards he didn’t even make an attempt to hide the tiredness in his body language, seemingly laboured even in his walking in between points. It was no longer about winning points, but trying to end them in any way possible, and I don’t think he was even attempting to hit winners.

I guess he had decided that he’d had a good week and that he’d happily accept the outcome of this match. And it has been a great week for Ball, coming into this event ranked in the 200s, and having never even won a single ATP main draw match prior to this week.