Weekend Finals

I had high hopes for this weekend, it was full of sporting promise, tennis, football, golf, cricket, F1, it was all happening, all weekend. In the end though it largely passed me by. Taking full advantage of the last day of sunshine I’m likely to see for a while I invited pretty much the entire family up to see my (the bank’s) new place on Saturday. Inevitably this resulted in me missing almost all of the day’s sport but I wasn’t too disappointed, I managed to catch the end of the WTA final in the morning which by all accounts Laura Robson kept respectable.  I was a little more disappointed yesterday though, my highlight of the weekend was to be the St. Petersburg final between Martin Klizan and Fabio Fognini. However my stomach had obviously gone into overdrive after my early lunch, as I couldn’t stay awake and napped through the entire first set. I woke up to Klizan breaking for a 6-2 2*-1 lead and a quick check of the match stats showed Klizan to be cruising. A wild backhand into the net at 0-15 though gave Fognini some hope that was quickly snuffed out with two decent serves. An easy put away for Klizan at 30-30 somehow went into the tramlines though and Fognini had the break point. That unforced error seemed to start a chain reaction which saw Klizan give up the break only for Fognini to throw down 4 UEs and his racket to be broke back again to 15. After 4 breaks of serve Klizan finally held his nerve and went on to rattle off the last 3 games and take it 6-2 6-3. My first real memory of Klizan is him beating Alexandr Dolgopolov in Morocco a couple of years ago. It was only really memorable because Dolgopolov was a player who I had started to notice, mainly because of his unusual technique and in particular his slice. However, in an entertaining battle Klizan came out on top in three sets although I didn’t have especially high hopes for him. I didn’t really see too much more of him until Wimbledon where he pushed Troicki very hard and since then he’s had a great run of performances including a 4^th round at the US Open beating (and costing me a fair bit of money) Tsonga along the way.

Speaking of Tsonga I was going to give his final against Andreas Seppi a miss but having failed to stay awake for the majority of the previous final I decided to watch it. In summary it wasn’t much of a contest, Tsonga was just too powerful and too accurate for the much improved [on hard-courts] Seppi. It started rather ominously for Seppi with Tsonga banging down an ace and holding to love. Seppi hit back though and got to 40-15 before two unforced errors brought it back to deuce. A couple of unreturned serves won Seppi the game. A wonderful forehand from Seppi forced an error at the net from Tsonga and Seppi was ahead for the first and only time at 0-15 but putting Seppi in his place Tsonga rattled off 4 easy points and took a 2-1 lead. More hard hitting from Tsonga earned him two breakpoints. He had been rather poor so far that week only converting 10 of 39 chances and that stat didn’t improve when Tsonga netted the return. He did however convert the next one after a half-hearted net approach from Seppi was spotted by Tsonga and his thumped cross court shot was too good for Seppi. That was the beginning of the end as Seppi didn’t come close to troubling Tsonga again, finding the power and accuracy just too much. He went on to lose the next 7 games but apart from a long forehand on match point Tsonga looked classy and at ease, dropping just 6 points on serve all match to win 6-1 6-2 and in truth that probably flattered Seppi.

With both tours moving to Asia for the next few weeks and me having to go to work it is unlikely I’ll get to watch too much tennis. That is a shame, but instead of dull match reports it will give me a chance to write about some of my favourite players, the types of matches I like and my previous gambling exploits, both successful and not. First up will be why I used to love Gilles Simon and why I don’t so much anymore.

For those who are interested Beacher now has a 48-0 record against me. I wish it was in my nature to give up, but sadly it isn’t.