ILE rolling non-slam Tennis thread

People always go on about the IW surface being hella slow and yet every year all the servebots seem to excel here. Raonic, Anderson, Isner all in the QF. GO AWAY ALL OF YOU, these people actively prevent me from watching tennis.

― lex pretend, Thursday, March 13, 2014 8:54 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

isner likes slow surfaces (clay is probably his best!) because his strokes take forever and when your serve is that good there's only so much the surface can do.

Raonic and Anderson are just playing great tennis in general. Ljubicic has done wonder for Raonic (and made him a much more pleasant player to watch).

in other news, only two of the top 8 seeds (nole & fed) are in the QF. when was the last time this happened?

― groovemaaan, Thursday, March 13, 2014 9:20 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I seem to remember reading that it hasn't happened at a 1000 in 5 years.

nice to finally see Dolgopolov play, still a joy to watch. Raonic was a mess, all those DFs, but he didn't look like he could ever really cope with Dolgopolov's best shots. nice moment at the net afterwards!

A consistent dolgo?

Third straight SF or better!

Stephens' footwork around her BH is woeful. She just doesn't move her feet!

did sam smith just say 'jamie hamilton' ?

Fantastic match there from A-Rad. She was (by her standards, and given her physical tools) very aggressive on Halep's serve and actually wore her out - Halep won most of the cat and mouse points but she was pretty tired by the middle of set two and just collapsed. The match where Halep served to stay in the match was fantastic, despite the fatigue, Halep would not give up. But A-Rad served it out cleanly next game anywa.

Flava Flav wins IW omigod! Well, Na was crap and A-Rad was visibly hobbled by a knee injury.

This Fed/Nole match started out great for Federer but is now looking like being one of those matches where his first serve % goes down to like 50 and he loses his serve once in sets 2 and 3. That last drop shot he tried was vintage Craperer.

oooooooo

DAMN YOU FEDERER, breaking back as I have to go to a job interview grrrr

Superb third-set, terribly anticlimactic tie-break.

great tournament for Fed tho, he seemed happy postmatch

assuming Ferrer doesn't defend his finals points in miami, Fed should get up to 4th by the start of clay season

happy Nole seems to be righting the ship

Aga officially has an issue with closing out tournaments now, right? Yes, she was injured...it's not just physical, though, that's three gigantic missed opportunities with relatively "easy" draws in the past nine months now. I wouldn't be surprised if she got more chances though, two of the women's Big Three are messes atm and the one who isn't has lost to IVANOVIC and CORNET in two of her three tournaments this year.

Murray and Lendl split :((

surprising! always seemed the least gimmicky of the old legend/current player partnerships.

Wish I'd seen the Miami qualy match between Kimiko Date-Krumm and Françoise Abanda - Abanda was born in 1997, after Date-Krumm retired for the first time. KDK won 7-6 4-6 6-4 and plays 1996 baby Vekic in the main draw...

(I think that's the second time Kimiko's played someone born after her first career ended, after Bencic at the AO)

wau baghdatis comes back from 2-5 down in the 3rd to beat giraldo w/o even going to a tiebreak

saw a bit of Thiem beating Rosol last night, was really impressed again. In one game he hit two incredible redirected BH DTL winners off full-blast Rosol FHs, a sweet sweet shot that I hope to see a lot more off in years to come.

dipped in and out of Kyle Edmund's match too - second time I've seen him, when he's on he has a v impressive power game that can hang with top 100 players already but he played a chokey service game after going up a set and a break, and it was basically NID from that minute - total collapse (this happened in Marseille vs Kamke as well).

watched a bit of Zheng and Davydenko, Jie and KING KOLYA are both shadows of their former selves. Jie really is the queen of hitting 3-4 brilliant, aggressive shots per rally that aren't quite winners and then missing the putaway.

Servebot Karolina Pliskova went up 5-4 40-0 against Peng and then lost 10 straight games hahahahahahaha.

*of

Peng smacking so many DTL winners vs Kerber

She also hit one amazing dropshot winner on the run in the first set and has tried to replicate it, like, six times since, all ending in terrible failure. That one barely made it over her own service line

It's so weird to me that Peng's career high ranking (14) is higher than Zheng's (15), comparing the two significant non-Li Chinese players of this era. Zheng's reached two Slam SFs, Peng's never gone beyond the last 16. Zheng has four titles, Peng has none. But Peng had that one super-consistent year in 2011 where she put up a solid, if not spectacular, result in almost every tournament she played, whereas Zheng's never managed to sustain her health or her form over a whole year.

wow such a textbook choke from Peng smh

Delbonis has no control over his game, Harrison has no game. This match is terrible

Like, why does Delbonis keep coming to the net when his volleys are so terrible? I don't think he's made one.

Vekic d. Kuznetsova 76 75 :D

Nice to see Donna emerge from her slump...

Tomic just lost 06 16 to Nieminen in 28 minutes. I know he's been injured, but...that's got to be the shortest ATP match in some time. Like, decades.

Or indeed EVER, as it's just been confirmed. A very Tomic-like record to set.

shved serving for 1st set and serena breaks her

such a weird game. and so LOUD

yea serena is fucking shouting

like, from 30-0 down Serena played two incredible points BUTTTTT she got hugely lucky to win the weird net cord one that would have given Shvedova 40-15. and then of course Shvedova flopped BP down

is the crowd drunk or something?

what the fuck is wrong with the crowd, seriously? I can't even tell what they're booing for.

Shvedova DF on SP, NID

that 4hand @ 7-7 was niice

wow garcia won a match in two tie-breaks

last point in the Tomic "match" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvDLOfu5Ols

lmao

today's play hasn't even started and Halep and Kleybanova have both w/d. ugh, had been looking fwd to the Halep/Venus 3R

also, it needs to be said that the disparity between men's and women's TV coverage is embarrassing - no way can this tournament lay claim to "fifth Slam" status when about a fifth of women's matches are televised as men's.

from a fan perspective I've always loved joint tournaments, and really it makes little sense that the ATP and WTA are so separate (in terms of ranking points, calendar etc) but this really demonstrates why a joint tour would just screw the women over completely

otm, it's pretty infuriating

Svitolina beating Bouchard is not really surprising given their h2h...

Bit disturbing how quickly the wheels have come off Muguruza's stellar start to the year though.

that last game between sharapova and safarova was outstanding

I went to bed when Ma$ha broke in the third set. Her hysterical fighting warrior mode remains the most insufferable of all.

This Vandeweghe run of actually winning matches is hideous.

Oh and is that Lisicki giving her third walkover in six tournaments this year? For "the flu"?

Vandeweghe winning matches is so gross. It's like... tennis gods adding insult to injury on top of Del Potro maybe being out for a year. CANNOT TAKE THIS.

That set wasn't as close as the scoreline. Only went to a TB because Li had a disastrous four-game stretch from 3-1 up, DFing and UEing all over the place. Outside of it, she had few difficulties and surprisingly, Keys never really imposed her power on Li. Keys seems to have plateaued if not actually regressed this year, her big weapons don't seem as effective for some reason.

meanwhile, baghdatis has come back to life here. but wtf is up with tsonga this season?

just switched to that and Tsonga looks dreadful