Doubles Take: Recapping the Nitto ATP Finals

Doubles Take looks back at the last event of 2020, the Nitto ATP Finals.

LEAVING LONDON IN STYLE

Plenty of tournaments have moved on from venues after a period of time, but there probably hasn’t been a sendoff like the one this year between the ATP Finals and London, the home of the season-ending championships since 2009.

Next year, the eight best teams will be competing in Turin, Italy, and the field will have a drastically different look from 2020. At least four of the pairs that were in London are ending their successful partnerships, a number that includes Lukasz Kubot and Marcelo Melo, who won tournaments at every level while playing together and were runners-up in London in 2017.

Despite coming into the tournament in fine form, Kubot and Melo didn’t make it out of the round-robin stage. The four teams that made it to the semifinals were Wesley Koolhof and Nikola Mektic, Edouard Roger-Vasselin and Jurgen Melzer, Australian Open champs Rajeev Ram and Joe Salisbury, and Horacio Zeballos and Marcel Granollers.

Based on seeding, the favorites to come through were Ram and Salisbury, and they appeared in good shape to close out their season the same way it began, with a major win. However, Roger-Vasselin and Melzer staged an epic comeback against the second seeds to reach the final.

On the other side of the draw, Mektic and Koolhof topped Granollers and Zeballos in straight sets to make it to their second big championship bout of 2020 after the US Open. The Croatian-Dutch duo had only reached one other final during the year, but had advanced to the semifinals at Roland Garros, proving they could step it up on the biggest occasions.

And this ATP Finals championship match certainly met that criteria.

With the teams facing off for the first time, Koolhof and Mektic raced through the opening set, 6-2. Melzer and Roger-Vasselin then took the second to force a deciding match tiebreaker, their third of the week. It was also Mektic and Koolhof’s third, having split the others, while their foes were perfect in that situation. Up 9-5 and holding multiple championship points, Mektic and Koolhof clinched the title behind a Melzer double fault for their first tournament triumph together.

Mektic and Koolhof are said to be heading their separate ways, too. They showed, though, that's there nothing better than going out on a high note.