Australian Open 2011 - Day 1 Blog

Sometimes the first day of Grand Slams can be underwhelming and routine, but today was a good day for me. It was a day filled with competitive matches, a variety of styles, and good tennis for the most part. Conditions were cold and windy with the occasional spitting of rain, which is better than the heat I suppose. However, one recurring problem seemed to present itself throughout the day, and I fear it will throughout the rest of the tournament.  From what I gathered today, there seems to be an increase in the crowd turnouts this year on the outside courts.  Either that or poor scheduling.

There were many formerly good players playing today, that the tournament organisers took very little notice of. Nikolay Davydenko, Gilles Simon (however he just won Sydney last week) and Richard Gasquet were all playing on courts where it was difficult to get a seat. The problem was that even if you did end up getting a seat, chances are it would be a horribly obstructed view, with not only the umpire’s chair in the way, but also with plenty of shade covers over the players’ chairs.

Before my seating troubles started, I headed over to Show Court 2 to watch Sam Querrey in action against Lukasz Kubot. I arrived quite early and took the second row from the front. It’s a great view, without any obstructions. Better than watching on a tiny, intimate court in my opinion.

Querrey arrived about 8 minutes late, much later than Kubot and that is very rare in a Grand Slam, I think. I couldn’t hear what he was saying but I saw a rather large amount of gesturing with his hands, once he got onto the court, as if to suggest he was misguided somehow into not finding his way to the correct place.

Play got underway soon afterwards, and it didn’t take long for the Polish fans to make their presence known. They were very frequent with their chanting and support, especially to start with, using any minor pauses in between points to make some noise. I kept trying to take photos of them while they were standing up but those pauses were really short, so I kept missing, and ended up giving up.

When Querrey started serving in the first game, I couldn’t believe the difference between his first and second serve. His first serve was hard and flat, and makes the kind of sound that comes from big servers. In comparison, his second serve seemed to float there forever after its bounce with plenty of time for players to take their racquet back and do whatever they want. He did improve it later on though, as it started to become a softer version of the first serve, but it still seemed to land mainly in the middle of the court.

In the early stages, Querrey’s forehand was nowhere near as potent as I thought it would be. He played mostly a counterpunching role to start with, hitting loopy shots with plenty of margin over the net, but he was okay when he was forced to go for it, like having to hit a passing shot. It’s amazing how many players seem to find it difficult hitting winners, but when presented with a “do-or-die” situation, they can do it pretty easily.  Of course that is also because it is more difficult for the net player to run it down once it goes past them. Some players probably wished their opponents would run to the net all the time.

I’m not sure Querrey is one of them though. He just has better passing shots than expected. Especially on the backhand side, and his ability to hit down-the-line on that side is better than I thought too. He keeps his racquet very still and low while hitting it, and it’s more reliable than the forehand which is more prone to shanking or late timing.

The match was an entertaining contrast of styles, a battle between an aggressive all-court player Kubot and the counterpuncher Querrey.

Kubot is a strong player, hits the ball hard from both sides, seemingly throwing his weight around the court. By that, I mean, using it to generate penetrating groundstrokes and to move athletically. Kubot doesn’t have the best side-to-side movement, but he makes the transition from the net to the baseline extremely well. Today, he was often up there before I even noticed. He also rarely seemed to need to hit a low volley. Though I did find it odd that he was either passed or had an easy volley to hit every time he made it to the net. Perhaps Querrey didn’t even think about making Kubot hit that many shoelace volleys.

I watched the first two and a half sets of this match, and it was quite a streaky match, but mostly at a good standard. Querrey was still finding his timing and too passive in the first set, but after the first couple of games, his serving improved so much that it gave him an edge and Kubot’s high risk game abandoned him in the crucial stages when he needed it.

In the second set, Kubot started swinging away and making shots right from the beginning, as if the pressure from the first set had been suddenly relieved. I have been interested lately to see how players handle low and high pressure moments, letdowns in the beginning of sets, and how they play when they are down on the scoreboard.

In this case, being down on the scoreboard really helped Kubot kick off the second set impressively. He carried on this sudden wave of confidence to hit through Querrey with countless forehand winners, though also Querrey’s serving quality had decreased allowing him more opportunity to. By then, Querrey had also improved his baseline play so this became a better spectacle. Querrey’s backhand did more damage in this match than the forehand, presumably because the match-up with Kubot’s backhand is better.

Returning first in the third game, at first I thought Kubot would continue his practically flawless display when he got off to a 0-30 start in the first game. But it didn’t eventuate and both players ended up struggling on many of their service games. When I left the match, Kubot had broken back Querrey to return to level terms.

Nikolay Davydenko’s match against Florian Mayer had just started, not that I knew. The only scoreboard updates I get are the changing scorelines each changeover in the stadium courts, except that it would never cover all the matches, and often skipped on Court 7, where these two played.

The match was in its early stages, 2-1 in the first set when I joined and I immediately started to regret my decision after noticing that the stands were completely full. Eventually I found a spot where I could peek through the blue sheet covering the side of the stands, though this is obviously not the ideal way to watch a tennis match. I simply wanted to find out what this match was like so far. I most definitely wasn’t going to watch the whole match looking through the blue sheet.

But the match looked good. Plenty of long competitive rallies, where you couldn’t guess who would get the better of it. Of course, there were also plenty of rallies with the trademark variety of Florian Mayer. Mayer broke serve with some great shotmaking. He digs so many balls back when he’s playing, and he always looks like he’s trying to catch up when he’s playing against the top players, but he often hangs in better than it looks like he will. That is, if he is dealing with a player, that uses a lot of pace. He likes the pace.

Meanwhile, the lack of pace was really making it difficult for Davydenko to finish off points. Even if he could handle it, he wasn’t able to push Mayer around the same way he pushes his other opponents around. Especially not when Mayer was buying himself additional time by not giving Davydenko much pace.

After the initial break of serve, I found that there were many people leaving all the time in the changeovers. Many people walked up the stairs not knowing if they’d find a seat, so I followed and ended up sitting on the stairs for a while. They don’t have any security for monitoring this on the smaller courts. It was an extremely cramped position on the stairs. I hoped that I would make it to the actual seats soon, but it was a little difficult because whoever closest to that empty seat would usually get it. It wasn’t on a first come, first serve basis.

After going through three or four changeovers, I was finally able to grab myself a real seat, and I was rewarded for my patience. The kind of patience that I don’t necessarily always have, but what I saw in this match kept me hanging around long enough.

The first set contained many entertaining rallies, with a wide array of shots from Mayer. Davydenko didn’t play that poorly, but couldn’t seem to finish Mayer off. A change of tactics allowed Davydenko to convincingly win the second set, choosing to sneak up to the net whenever he had Mayer stretching out wide often finishing it with his favourite angled touch volleys. Suddenly the amount of extended rallies had drastically decreased.

It seemed like Davydenko had found the formula, and I thought he was on his way to winning the match. But the third set turned out to be a very inconsistent set from both players, with many losses of concentration. It was almost like both players were trying to conserve energy for the battle ahead. Mayer needed to fight through a service game early on, so it came completely out of the blue when he broke Davydenko’s serve to lead the match yet again. Mayer took a more aggressive approach this set, and he wasn’t always successful. But he needed to do so, as a weapon against Davydenko’s increasingly aggressive approach.

Mayer held onto his serve all the way through that set until he tried to serve for the set. At Deuce 5-3, Mayer dropped his racquet after his service motion then picked it up again to play a competitive, long rally. He ended up firing an impressive forehand crosscourt winner, but the umpire awarded the point to Davydenko. Mayer then smashed his racquet in frustration after losing the next ad point with a forehand error. Actually it was very much at the level of a Gonzalez racquet smash. I don't know why the umpire didn't stop the point earlier. One of the guys behind me repeated this story about the racquet drop and smash whenever his mates would walk past, so it happened a couple of times. It was obviously a dramatic moment.

That racquet smash really heightened the tension of the match, as it was drawing into the closing stages of the third set. Mayer was in a mentally fragile state, but also in an extremely fiery mood. Despite losing that break of serve, the energy and adrenaline going through him in the third set tie-break helped him raise his level, and ultimately win the set. Davydenko’s subdued body language and attitude surely didn’t help his chances, though the other reason is that he leaked a few key errors.

The fourth set was a continuation of the third set tie-break for Mayer, while Davydenko’s error count started to pile up immensely. At times, when he missed a shot, he’d have a dejected expression on his face, which is more rare than you would think in professional tennis. He looked sad and disappointed, not angry.

Mayer had break point chances in all of Davydenko’s service games in this set, and he really should have secured a second break to make it much easier for himself. After failing to convert in two separate games, Mayer lost his serve, then broke back again.

Despite Davydenko playing poorly for the most part in this set, there were a couple of games where he played some great tennis. The contrast between those two standards was really obvious, and I couldn’t believe how he could change from one extreme to another just like that.

The final game where Mayer served for the match was one of his great games, but not enough for him to fight back. That game had a controversial overrule, changing Mayer’s shot from an ‘out’ to ‘in’ call. Davydenko seemed to have a whole new intensity that game, nothing like what I saw from him in the last two sets. He threw everything he had at Mayer, and Mayer showed more determination than normal to get it back, and eventually he’d finally find the right time to pull the trigger himself.

Realizing how tough some of those last games were, Mayer was thoroughly happy with his win, celebrating by lying on the ground for a short while.

After this match, I quickly browsed the outside courts to see what was going on, then made an impulsive decision to watch the end of Philipp Kohlschreiber’s match against Tobias Kamke. Kamke had won the first two sets, Kohlschreiber had taken the third and was up a break in the fourth.

This was a relatively inconsistent match from the point where I started watching, where it became quite difficult to sink my teeth into it. Rather than trying to win in an outright way, it looked like it was more a matter of both players trying to manage their own games and fight through the match. Kohlschreiber was much more consistent in the fourth set, and that was the big difference. He was mixing it up more than I usually see from him on the backhand, hitting just as many slice backhands as drive backhands. Kamke was making plenty of errors, but seeing his play in the fifth set, might suggest that he was not exactly fully focused on the task in the fourth. Or either he was not as fired up anyway.

I’ve seen it often, players being less motivated to finish off a match in a fourth set (if struggling with tiredness, or poor play, or something else), but have a completely different mindset when it comes to the fifth. I suppose, it comes with knowing that the match will be over soon either way.

Kamke was down an early break in the fifth set but broke back. His consistency and execution of his aggressive shots improved greatly in this set. He really likes to step in and go for the backhand, but too much is going on before he hits the stroke, and he is prone to make errors on that side. Later, Kamke’s inconsistency came back to haunt him, losing the crucial break of serve.

One of the spectators sitting near me was constantly complaining about why the match wasn’t over yet, and wishing that it was, which was rather puzzling since there were plenty of other choices. Not to mention that leaving the grounds is another option. It was already around 5pm anyway. Eventually, after 15 minutes of complaining (or possibly more), they did leave.

After this, I thought about watching Gasquet’s match against Dancevic but the stands were already full, and on this court, there are only stands on one side. In my experience, that court is always overcrowded. So I referred back to my order of play sheet, and headed over to the court where Gilles Simon was playing to see if it had started yet. It had.

Simon was playing against Yen-Hsun Lu, who traditionally receives a lot of support from the Taiwanese fans. The same was true today, and the left side of the stands looked like it was filled with red, or at least bits of red everywhere. In between points, they would swing their flags around, but again I was not quick enough with the camera to capture it well. Sometimes they would do their chants which sounded a bit like "Aussie, Aussie, Oi Oi Oi" in another language, but whether it really was exactly the same, I'm not sure.

The stands were full, but on the right stand, people would leave often and there would be vacated seats. As soon as I sat down on one, I could see why. The view was terrible. This court seems to have a few additional shade covers on where the players are sitting compared to the court that Davydenko and Mayer played on. I can’t understand the need for all these “view blockages”. Make them sit in the changeovers in the sun for our benefit, or hold an umbrella themselves if they really want to. I quickly got up out of my spot and decided to stand up instead on the corner where I had a better view.  From this view, whenever Lu comes over to the side where I'm standing, I can hear him loudly exhaling.

This was the battle of the consistent baseliners. The kind of match where it doesn’t take long to have a look, and think, they’re going to take all night. Despite a couple of 6-2 sets thrown in there, it did take a long time. The match also rarely changed from the original model that the match started with. In the beginning, Lu was like a slightly better version of Simon. Hitting the ball harder and taking more chances, going closer to the lines. On the other hand, it felt like Simon’s tactic was to make every rally as long as possible. This means not taking any chances. I wonder if this is how he played before he showed sudden improvements in 2008. The kind of tennis that earned him the tag of being known as a pusher.

The other thing that can be frustrating about Simon, is that sometimes it doesn’t look like he is giving it 100%. Because of that, it also looked like he could run all day, and play all day while running around just as effectively as before. After all he was barely breaking a sweat, as in everything seemed to come very easily to him. Gilles Simon makes tennis look very easy. Or more accurately, Gilles Simon’s B-grade standard is tennis made to look easy.

Today he was hitting every groundstroke at about 70% pace, compared to his full pace, and rarely changing it up. Hitting so many balls into the court, I often found myself wondering why he doesn’t try to do things differently. Again, he mostly stuck with going crosscourt, and they exchanged a ridiculous amount of backhand crosscourts with each other.

It was a real battle, but after the first set, Simon’s consistency began to improve, with the gap in unforced errors widening significantly between Simon and Lu. Lu had about 60 unforced errors, while Simon had around 30.

Sometimes when Lu was down in a match, he’d try to go for more, thinking that he would need to do more, and it would cost him an additional break in a set.

In the end, Simon’s continuing consistency was too much of a problem for Lu to overcome. The match ended with a really nice handshake, and I can see why, given how much both players battled in this match.

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

Note: I've now added Youtube links to videos I've uploaded myself...

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.

Seeing Potential or Limitations?: Discussing Sam Querrey's Prospects

This time last year, Sam Querrey seemed to be on his way to making a steady rise up the rankings. Before his performance at the US Open last year where he lost to Rafael Nadal in the 4th round, perhaps it was hard to see what Querrey could develop his game into to become a consistent threat.

When it comes to spotting raw talent, it must be said that it’s not really my forte. When do you decide that some weaknesses are holes in a player’s game that can be considerably improved or whether it will end up being their achilles heel for the rest of their careers?

I recall commentators years ago mentioning how Dinara Safina’s movement was a big weakness. And it’s not like her ball-striking abilities impressed people in a way that Lindsay Davenport did. Should it be concluded that because of Querrey’s height, we can’t really expect him to be that mobile around the court?

It’s been documented in the past year that Querrey has been working on his fitness and movement. Watching him play, footwork should probably be just as much of a priority. I was having a look at his stroke production and it seemed to be very much an upper-body motion, particularly with one of his major weapons, the forehand.

With the top players, footwork and stroke production is really combined as one action in itself, so I guess I’d describe that as having as a fluid motion. But with Querrey, he’s trying to hit his forehand with as much force as possible with his racquet swing, while trying to maintain the right footwork in his movement and keeping his steps precise. I don’t think footwork comes naturally to him. It’s something he’s had to work on, and will need to continue to work on. He’s just so naturally relaxed in his approach to tennis that it bogs him down at times, although it would surely make him an excellent Davis Cup player.

The Newport semi-final contested between Querrey and Fabrice Santoro was an interesting contrast of styles, demonstrating two very different ways of taking control of points. Querrey using the natural power that he possesses on his groundstrokes, particularly his forehand to dominate points. But Santoro showed that there are other ways to take control of a point other than hitting hard, penetrating groundstrokes.

The intent wasn’t to place the ball out of Querrey’s reach, but rather to try to make Querrey stretch out for shots, hit shots off-balance then keep him moving around on the dead run, defending while being completely helpless. Those crosscourt short angle slices really work well to open up the court, particularly on the backhand side. Grass is definitely an excellent surface for Santoro, his slice shots skidding lower and being more difficult to punish for his opponents.

The problem was if Santoro couldn’t place the ball wide enough or deep enough, that allowed Querrey to take control of the points, and Querrey was patient enough to not give away too many errors. He was hitting the ball hard while realizing at the same time that often it’s not necessary to hit the ball close to the lines. In this particular match-up, he could afford to be patient. Patience is also something that Querrey has had to work on over the years, being less of a loose cannon in his shotmaking and waiting for the right shot to pull the trigger. He still makes a fair amount of errors although I feel that more of those are movement-related, where he struggles particularly on the dead run to do anything other than block the ball back.

In the end, the biggest difference in this match was the strength of Querrey’s serve. They popped up on the screen the serving statistics of all the entrants of the tournament, to show that Querrey was convincingly leading the ace statistics of all four semi-finalists, serving about twice as many as the second place scorer, Rajeev Ram.

Querrey has a nice and relaxed smooth service action, and it’s very efficient too. It doesn’t look like anything spectacular; it’s more of an upright motion than most of the good servers. He doesn’t throw his body weight into the shot as much but the simplicity of it allows him to hit his spots well (or at least he did in this match). He played a superb second set tie-break, hitting an unreturnable serve on every one of his service points, as well as stepping up his level on return as well to comfortably take the tie-break in the second set, and win in straight sets.