'Morning. Pete is still on vacation (until the 20th August). In the meantime, this is the Tribe's daily post for discussing the tennis matches taking place in Cincy and Toronto. The Order of Play for the men's Masters Series tournament can be found on this link. The schedule for the women's event in Toronto is here.
In Cincinnati, there was something of a bonfire of the seeds yesterday, with six seeds of the original sixteen exiting the tournament, leaving only six in the last sixteen. Two players retired for injury-related reasons (Richard Gasquet and Rafel Nadal, due to blisters and an arm injury respectively). Novak Djokovic appeared to have run out of gas when facing Carlos Moya, after his stunning victories over the world's top three players to take the Montreal Masters title last week. Ivan Ljubicic, Fernando Gonzalez and Mikhail Youzhny were also on the casualty list.
First on Center Court will be two of those non-seeds, world number 19 Carlos Moya and world number 78, the qualifier Juan Martin Del Potro. In their only career meeting to date, on a hard court in Mumbai earlier this year, Del Potro dispatched Moya 6-3, 6-2.
Later the sixteenth seed David Ferrer faces number three seed Andy Roddick; their head to head is 2-1 in favour of Roddick, with Ferrer's sole victory over Roddick coming in three sets in Key Biscayne last year; Roddick defeated Ferrer in two sets in the same tournament earlier this year. Roddick is last year's defending champion - in the absence of at least one of his recent nemeses (Nadal) in his half, he now looks to have a very good chance of making the final.
Top seed Roger Federer is 4-0 career-wise against today's opponent, Marcos Baghdatis. All of their encounters have been on hard courts. Their last meeting was, of course, the four-set Australian Open final of 2006. Baghdatis also took Federer to four sets during the 2004 US Open. After his three-set defeat by Rafael Nadal in Dubai earlier this year, Baghdatis was heard to say that he lacks some of the belief required to beat the top players. This is one characteristic he definitely doesn't share with Novak Djokovic, if this remains true.
I also took a quick look at the head-to-heads in today's other matchups. Nikolay Davydenko, the fifth seed, is 5-0 in his head to head against today's opponent, the number 10 seed Tomas Berdych, while Lleyton Hewitt has so far been equally dominant against Jurgen Melzer (their last meeting coming in the hard-fought Las Vegas final earlier this year). Last year's finalist Juan Carlos Ferrero has a 3-0 head-to-head against number 9 seed James Blake, with two of those victories coming in Cincy (last year, and 2002), and their most recent meeting a four-setter at Wimbledon, during Ferrero's career-best run to the quarterfinals there. America's Sam Querrey is 0-1 against the Argentine Juan Monaco. This was a three-setter on clay, Monaco's favoured surface, in Estoril earlier this year. Can he do better this time? All I'll say is that regardless of Nadal's condition yesterday, Monaco looked pretty sharp to me when I watched the replay later. Finally, Jarkko Nieminen is 1-0 against Nicolas Almagro - the two last met on clay in Sopot in 2005.
Enjoy today's tennis!
-- Rosangel