Tommy Robredo Cruises in Santiago, defeating Maximo Gonzalez

I’m not quite sure how Tommy Robredo has slipped down to a ranking of 40 over the past year, apart from stating the obvious that he isn’t playing as well as he used to. That’s what the ranking suggests. A closer look at his rankings breakdown suggests that he’s not doing as well in the optional events as he used to.

2011 is a new year though, and he has gotten off to a good start with a 4th round result at the Australian Open (losing to Roger Federer) and now reaching the semi-finals of Santiago.

He will fancy his chances of going further in this draw with the remaining players in the draw having never won a title before. He faces Fabio Fognini in the semi-finals, then potentially the winner of Potito Starace and Santiago Giraldo. Though I think it would make a nice headline if Santiago Giraldo won in Santiago.

In today’s match, he defeated Maximo Gonzalez quite comfortably 6-3 6-1. This was the first time I had seen Gonzalez play before, so I had my eyes firmly focused on him rather than Robredo, out of curiosity. I like to scout players too. The signs were promising to start with. Gonzalez has nice heavy groundstrokes, and when he matches up with Robredo, he appears to be the stronger of the two. Stronger, not better. More penetrating in his groundstrokes. If we just looked at groundstrokes while they were warming up, and not accuracy or the ability to be aggressive with it, then Gonzalez would be more impressive. The heaviness of his groundstrokes reminds me a little bit of Jose Acasuso, but with nowhere near as much pace.

The match was even for the first half of the set, and I kept expecting Robredo to make more inroads into the return of serve. Mostly because Gonzalez’s serve is quite awful. I think even I have more a fluid motion than that (but mine is jerky in general too). It comes from the same school of serving that Juan Ignacio Chela graduated from, before he changed it into something much better midway into his career. He has his racquet back and his service motion halfway complete before he even tosses the ball up, then he briefly pauses as the ball goes up and finishes off the motion. The serve often lands in the middle of the box. Robredo generally returns serve quite far behind the baseline though, so it didn’t get punished that much. Except somewhere in the second set, when Robredo hit a backhand down-the-line return winner that he surely didn’t mean to hit.

While I’m currently into making player comparisons with myself, I was also amused to see that Gonzalez sometimes lifts his left leg up a little bit while hitting a forehand, just like I do but to a lesser extent. He does it particularly when hitting it aggressively. But he’s better than me. He can plant his left leg when he’s in a more defensive stance, which is good otherwise he wouldn’t have made it into this (clay) event.

In any case, I thought Gonzalez was playing better than his ranking of 140, until his game went downhill quickly after he missed many break points in one game. Suddenly he began to make plenty of awful errors, trying to play overly aggressively above his ability, and not digging very deep. His movement isn’t as good as Robredo’s. If he’s further behind the baseline then it needs to be more defensive. If he has more time, then he can go for it. Wow, I can relate to these points. Trying to hit a winner while going backwards is never going to work. I constantly mumble that to myself while playing.

I thought Robredo served quite well, for his standards. He has an accurate serve, and can get good angles on the wide serve on the ad court. He’s a good server for his height. Though I should also point out that Gonzalez’s return of serve is a weakness. He needs more time to hit good shots.

They tried to motivate the players before the match started by playing Eye of the Tiger, which I seem to remember was Hewitt’s favourite song to listen to before matches. Or was it Nadal? They liked to play rock music in the changeovers, even while players were walking out from their chairs. I think they only stopped it once they got closer to the baseline. Most tournaments playing music these days go with pop music, so this was a little different from the usual. I liked hearing Faith No More’s Epic.