Marat Safin dropped so low in the rankings that he had to go through qualifying to get into the Hamburg Masters event. Somehow, though, he managed to resurrect himself long enough to take out Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon.

Omigod, Marat Safin beat Novak Djokovic in the second round at Wimbledon today! What is going on? Is Marat a bit chuffed that his baby sister Dinara Safina just played the grand slam of her life at the French Open? Was he afraid that his sister might overtake his slam total of two? Does he want to send a reminder to the top three that he was once Roger Federer’s main competitor?

Maybe he read that Nole signed up with CAA (Creative Arts Agency) – the Los Angeles based uber-talent agency that currently represents David Beckham, George Clooney, and Marilyn Manson, among many others – and it pissed him off because he never signed with CAA and he has the same manager as Nole.

Maybe, but the wind, a bit of idolatry, the pressure, and some mental fatigue also helped.

The wind made it hard to find a rhythm and Nole never did find his rhythm. He was broken at love to go down 3-4 in the first set and by this time Nole had already hit four double faults and traded breaks with Marat. It wasn’t just Nole screwing up, though; he went for big second serves because Marat was eating up his second serve. On the other hand, Nole hit ten double faults in the match so clearly he wasn’t feeling so good. Marat held on to the break to win the first set 6-4.

Jeez, Marat has the prettiest two-hander in the game and I have missed that shot so much since he’s devolved into the 75th ranked player on tour. It’s the most efficient stroke in tennis. He simply takes the racket back and follows through with a short, sweet stroke. That shot kept him even in the second set as neither player was broken

In the tiebreaker, Nole looked out of sorts. He sent a forehand long and followed that up with an easy backhand into the net to go down 1-4 but, again, he had help. Safin put a very good wide serve back into play. By now Nole should have been expecting that but he wasn’t and he got some bad luck too. He hit a shot that landed on the baseline but was called out and, on the replay, Marat his a pretty drop volley.

Marat Safin was now up two sets to none over Novak Djokovic and we were starting to look for explanations. Nole had a mix of contradictory emotions going through his head. He had the pressure of keeping up with Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. He’d played, and lost, to Nadal in his last three tournaments and they were critical matches because he could have passed Nadal in the rankings had he won.

The pressure led to mental fatigue, which he admitted after the match, and he was also playing a man he’d idolized:

I looked at him as one of the greatest players, one of the idols. I admired the way he plays. …I have a lot of respect for him. Maybe that played a roll today in the match.

He not only idolized Marat but he has yet to win a set off him. Nole won only three games in their only previous match at the 2005 Australian Open. He was 17 at the time and it was his first slam so that match shouldn’t count, but I’m looking for anything to explain Nole’s lack of fight. He won two games in the third set and ended the match with a double fault as Marat won the match, 6-4, 7-6(3), 6-2.

There’s the opposite side of pressure too. Nole knew that Marat had seldom put consecutive wins together this year and he was thrown off when a different Marat turned up on court. And it was a Marat who had no pressure at all because no one expected anything of him. He hadn’t even looked at his draw beyond Nole. Why should he? He acted like he took a tranquilizer before the match. Except for a few swings at the ball after an error, there was no mental instability to be found. After the match, same thing. Not even an impish grin. All you saw was a tennis player under control.

If that wasn’t shocking enough, there were also his motor skills. He hasn’t played well since returning to the tour from a knee injury in 2006. Before the injury he was ranked in the top five but he hasn’t gone above number 22 since. He just doesn’t have the explosiveness he used to have and he’s never played well on grass.

We can explain away the grass by remembering that grass ain’t what it used to be. It’s much slower now and Marat gave thanks for that after the match. But how do we explain his court coverage and dead on return of serve?

Throw in a bad day for Nole and a resurrection for Marat and that will have to do.

Andy Murray won his first round match at Wimbledon today. Can he get to the quarterfinals?

Wimbledon is in full bloom and I see that our favorite player here at Tennis Diary, Benjamin Becker, took Nikolay Davydenko out in straight sets in the first round. With Becker’s huge serve, that’s a match he should win and we’ll all be pretty happy if he gets back to winning matches like that because his ranking should be in the top fifty. I feel bad because I’ve stopped following his career but he’s gotta give me some reason to follow it and I think he eventually will.

Meanwhile, I want to see if Andy Murray has what it takes to get to the quarterfinals this year which is what I’m expecting him to do. At first, I thought about answering the question: Can Murray win Wimbledon, but it’s pretty clear he can. He has a good record on fast surfaces and he has the single-minded competitiveness you need to win a slam. He also has the orneryness you need to deal with the U.K. media – in other words, he’s not too nice.

Okay, so what about the quarterfinals, his probably endpoint as his opponent in that round would be Rafael Nadal? Here are the variables:

Injures: I think Murray will always be dogged by injuries. He fell on his thumb, for heaven’s sake, at Queen’s, but it appears to be alright. If it doesn’t rain too hard, he should be able to get through five matches this year without splitting his pants and possibly straining something else, and next year there’ll be a roof over center court and since he’s Britain’s great hope, he can expect to play on that court much of the time. In fact, Fabrice Santoro played the first match in his 19 year career on center court at Wimbledon by dint of drawing Murray as his first round opponent.

Serve: Good enough. He popped a 136mph (219kph) in his match with Santoro. In didn’t go in but so what?

Aggression: Murray’s former coach, Brad Gilbert, thinks Murray should be more aggressive and that’s good enough for me. Here is the golf metaphor he used while watching Murray play Santoro:

He has the ability to be aggressive and he sometimes, under pressure, keeps that club in his bag.

Instead on aggression, Murray prefers the drop shot. He’d won the first two sets and was even at 4-4 in the second set when he got an open court to hit to. Instead of flattening the ball out and putting the ball away, he floated a short drop shot over the net. Murray won the point but it left a ball in play that should never have been in play. It’s also a stroke that might work against a 35 year old player at the end of his career – Santoro, but isn’t likely to scare someone like Nadal in the least.

In the next game, Murray had Santoro down 0-30, one point away from getting a match point, when he sent a wayward, high-floating drop shot beyond the sideline. You could hear a collective groan from the crowd that fairly cried out, “Andy, would you please just hit the damn ball!” Maybe this is why he doesn’t do it: at deuce, he had an open court down the line but he swung hard with the two-hander and hit nothing but net.

He repeated the pattern in the third set tiebreaker only worse. At 2-2 in the tiebreaker, he dipped down to one knee to hit a low drop shot that skipped off the top of the net and managed to land just a few inches inside the lines. It was an entirely stupid choice on a point that could have put him down a minibreak. On his second match point, he slammed a soft second serve from Santoro right into the net. I would need to see a whole more of those slammed shots make their way over the net and a larger percentage of those shots make up his repertoire before I’m willing to crown him with a Wimbledon title.

He did get aggressive in one area, however. He made 35 appearances at the net and converted 69% of those points which is a good set of numbers.

Temper: Santoro can drive the most sane tennis player crazy with his two-handed forehand slice and net approaches on return of serve, but Murray kept his cool.

The Draw: Richard Gasquet could be his fourth round opponent and he looked very sharp against Mardy Fish today. Murray is 0-2 against Gasquet on hard court and he’ll have a harder time coming to the net against him. At the moment, though, I’d say that Murray’s head is screwed on a lot tighter than Gasquet’s, so yeah, I think he can get to the quarterfinals. What do you think?

Here and There

Olga Savchuck was down 3-6, 0-5, to Jelena Jankovic when she took off to cover a forehand crosscourt and hit a running drop shot, no lie, and she didn’t even stop after she hit it. She never broke stride as she followed it up with a dash to the net to cover Jankovic’s response – which never came. Savchuck lost the set and the match but, wow, I’ve never seen that before.

Andy Roddick had no trouble getting past Eduardo Schwank in straight sets but I’m a bit unsettled about his chances of getting to the semifinals. He spent the Wimbledon run-up rehabbing a shoulder injury and when he talked about his shoulder after the match, he was noncommittal:

Shoulder feels all right. Yeah, I feel good. Yeah, I don’t know if it’s going to be perfect. But, you know, I did all right considering. You know, it pulled up all right. Yeah, I mean, probably as good as can be expected.

Jeez, make up your mind will ya? For my part, if I’m a gambler or – as I am – a fantasy tennis prognosticator, I want an MRI or at least an x-ray before I plunk my money down or pick him for my team. With a cranky shoulder and a less than perfect serve, he’ll have a harder time getting past his next opponent, Janko Tipsarevic. Remember Roger Federer’s muckup at the Australian Open that went to 10-8 in the fifth set? Federer may not have been feeling top level because he was suffering through a bout of mini-mononucleosis, but Tipsarevic refused to go away and a long match like that might be the end of Roddick.

Speaking of Benni Becker’s win over Davydenko: what was Davydenko thinking? He skipped the grass court tournaments to play on clay in Warsaw and he had fourth round Wimbledon points to defend. That means he’ll lose his number four ranking. By the way, in his post-match media session he was asked 17 questions and 11 of them were about match-fixing. It’s not like he’s the only player to have a suspicious betting pattern turn up in his match, you know?

The problem is that Betfair voided the bets on his match in Sopot, Poland, last year even though it had never voided all bets on a match before and it hasn’t done it since. Instead, if Betfair thinks a match is suspicious, it pays off the bettors and alerts the ATP to a possible problem. Meanwhile, the ATP has a list of matches with suspicious betting patterns and the names of players who’ve been involved in repeated suspicious matches thanks to Ben Gunn and Jeff Rees, the authors of the “Environmental Review of Integrity in Professional Tennis” which was released last month.

Davydenko’s match was definitely suspicious, but as long as the list of other suspicious matches is kept private, he’ll be the focus of all gambling questions and that’s rather unfair.

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Yes it’s time for Wimbledon, the second grand slam event in the fantasy tennis season. We need eight players for our fantasy team so we need two players from each quarter – the quarterfinalists. Spend a lot of time picking your team because each slam pays more than twice as much as any other event on the schedule.

Wimbledon draw (grass, first prize: $1,462,500)

At a quick glance my job looks pretty easy today. All I have to do is pick Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, and Andy Roddick then find four other players to round out my team. Let’s see if that’s true.

In the top half of Federer’s quarter, Lleyton Hewitt has lost his last 11 matches to Federer, Fernando Gonzalez is 1-11 against Federer lifetime, and Robin Soderling and Gael Monfils have never gone past the 3rd round here. Federer looks safe to get to the quarterfinals.

In the bottom half of Federer’s quarter, there are three players who have a good chance to get to the quarterfinals: Philipp Kohlschreiber, Mario Ancic, and David Ferrer. Tomas Berdych reached the quarterfinals last year but he hasn’t played well since coming back from injury. This is a tough choice. Ancic has reached the quarterfinals and semifinals here. Ferrer has never gone past the fourth round but he beat Ancic this week in s’Hertogenbosch and he’s 2-0 over Ancic. Kohlschreiber reached the final at Halle and has an excellent record on grass but he’s never gone past the third round here and he lost in the first round last year.

I’m going with Ferrer though I’m a bit nervous about it because that means that I’ll probably be picking five of the top eight seeds to reach the quarterfinals. There is a precedent: last year there were five top eight seeds in the quarterfinals; in fact, all of the quarterfinalists last year were seeded.

Djokovic looks safe in the top half of his quarter. Juan Martin Del Potro reached the semifinals at s’Hertogenbosch this week but he’s no match for Djokovic.

In the bottom half of Djokovic’s quarter there is one good possibility and a few questions. Marcos Baghdatis has reached the quarterfinals and the semifinals in the past two years and he got to the quarterfinals at Halle last week before losing to Federer. Ivo Karlovic and David Nalbandian are the questions. Karlovic won the Nottingham event this week, reached the quarterfinals before losing to Nadal at Queen’s last week, and regularly tears up the field at pre-Wimbledon events. And yet, the last time he went past the first round here was 2004. As for Nalbandian, these days you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. He reached the semifinals at Queen’s and beat Richard Gasquet along the way, but he just doesn’t look like he’s in shape.

I’m nervous about Baghdatis because his results are not good this year and he dropped out of the Surbiton grass challenger with an ankle injury. But he did well at Halle and he may have dropped out of Surbiton because he didn’t like the prospect of the playing the second round on indoor hard court where it was switched due to rain. I’m going with Baghdatis.

Will Roddick be the fourth semifinalist along with Federer, Djokovic and Nadal? Maybe not but he should get to the quarterfinals. Except for a third round loss to Andy Murray two years ago, he’s reached the quarterfinals or better the past five years. James Blake is in Roddick’s section and he beat him on grass two years ago but that was back when Roddick was struggling mightily. Dmitry Tursunov is a good grass court player but he’s never beaten Roddick on a fast court. Roddick has beaten Nicolas Mahut both times they’ve met and Mahut is having a terrible year on grass. Roddick it is.

The bottom half of Roddick’s quarter is a jumble. Paul-Henri Mathieu beat Maric Cilic – his possible second round opponent – in the first round at Queen’s last week. Then Cilic turned around and beat him in the first round at Nottingham this week. Jonas Bjorkman and Nikolay Davydenko are also in this section. Bjorkman reached the semifinals here last year but he’s not playing well this year and Davydenko is unreliable on grass.

I’m going to pick between Mathieu and Cilic. Mathieu beat Radek Stepanek, David Ferrer, and Ivan Ljubicic before losing to Roddick here last year but he’s 1-2 on grass this year. He also beat Cilic in Munich and Miami this year but all four of their matches have gone three sets. I’m going out on a limb and picking Cilic because Mathieu has a lifetime losing record on grass and I think Cilic is better on this surface. Cilic is also 2-0 over Davydenko and reached the semifinals at Nottingham.

Nadal is one obvious choice in his quarter. There isn’t anyone in his section who can threaten him.

In the other half of Nadal’s quarter, Richard Gasquet and Andy Murray look the strongest. Gasquet is recovering slowly from his recent malaise. He did reach the quarterfinals at Queen’s but only the second round at s’Hertogenbosch. Those are similar to his results last year and he followed that up with a semifinals here but I think he’s still in recovery so I don’t expect him to do as well this year. Murray has had his usual assortment of injuries recently – he fell on his thumb and withdrew after reaching the quarterfinals at Queen’s, but he beat Roddick here last year in the fourth round and I think he’s ready to move on to the quarterfinals so I’m picking him.

Picks
Federer, Ferrer, Djokovic, Baghdatis, Roddick, Cilic, Murray, Nadal.

Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic are turning political.

I was walking down the street this afternoon when a man walked up to me and said he was doing a survey for a college course and he wanted to ask me a few questions. Okay, I said and kept on walking – if he wanted to ask me questions, then he’d have to keep up with me. These are the questions he asked me:

When did you have your last haircut? One month ago.
Did people work harder 50 years ago? People work longer hours today with all the technical crap you have to deal with but people worked harder physically fifty years ago.
What’ was the first thing you noticed about the interviewer?

I wasn’t sure what to say to that last one because I was looking where I was going, not at the interviewer, but I finally decided that his Bermuda shorts were the first thing I noticed. I think that the first two questions he asked were distractions. The subject of his survey was probably perception – what was my perception of him? My first thought was preppy. He was probably middle or upper class. Poor people don’t wear Bermuda shorts.

But it’s that second question that interests me today because there is a labor problem with the ATP tour. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic are all running for a seat on the ten member player council. The player council elects the three player representatives on the board of directors. There are also three tournament director representatives on the board. The CEO of the ATP, Etienne de Villiers, has the tiebreak vote.

If I’m the number one, two, or three tennis player in the world, all I want to do it practice, play, get in a few rounds of golf now and then, and spend the rest of my time doing a whole lot of nothing. Instead, Roger, Rafa, and Nole are getting political and that means the players are angry.

The player council recently jettisoned player rep Perry Rogers. Rogers was Andre Agassi’s longtime manager and agent so you’d think he’d do what’s best for the players. But he was a strong supporter of de Villiers and that made the players angry so they fired him.

What do the players want? They want to make as much money as possible for as little work as possible. We all do. What do the tournament directors want? They want sponsors for their tournaments, TV contracts, and record attendance at their events. What does de Villiers want? He wants to make everyone happy but, like most CEOs, his job is to make his company grow.

And that is at odds with the players wants. For instance, the tour has awarded a Masters level event, now known as a 1000 series event, to Shanghai. That means players will have to schlep off to Asia in the fall when they might otherwise have skipped it because 1000 series events are mandatory. It also means that the ATP had to dump a few of its current Masters series events because that was the deal – the players would only have to play in eight Masters series events if the ATP was going to make them schlep all over the place.

And here is the biggest problem of all. The ATP managed to get rid of the Masters event in Monte Carlo by allowing them to keep their Masters designation but removing it from the players required attendance list. They weren’t so lucky with Masters event in Hamburg. The Quatar tennis association owns part of the Hamburg Open and they have a lot more money that Monte Carlo so they weren’t willing to accept a deal. They also have a lot more money than the ATP.

Qatar and Dubai – two lucrative stops on the both the ATP and WTA tour – are transforming their oil-based economies to more dependence on tourism and sporting events bring tourists. According to my sources, the ATP has spent $8 million dollars fighting Hamburg in court. The New York Times reports the amount as $7 million. My sources put the ATP yearly budget at around $11 million so you can see the problem.

Villiers is in trouble no matter how the court case turns out – the case will be heard in a U.S. court in the state of Delaware next month. If the ATP wins the court case then the players are unhappy because that means there’ll be one less clay court Masters event. If Hamburg wins the case, the players are still unhappy because de Villiers will have spent a whole lot of the ATP’s money for naught and now there’ll be nine Masters events instead of eight.

De Villiers’ contract ends in December and clearly he hasn’t done his job because the players are very angry at him and one of the tournaments is dragging him through a lengthy court case. The three player reps and the three tournament director reps on the board of directors choose the CEO and they will decide de Villiers’ fate. According the Charlie Bricker at the Florida Sun-Sentinel, the other two player reps will also step down and all three player reps will be chosen at a meeting of the player council at Wimbledon.

Clearly the player council is putting itself into position to remove de Villiers. If the three player reps refuse to vote for him, the board of directors will have to choose someone else. It’s a rare show of power by the players and I welcome it. But if the player council is replacing all three player reps, that means the reps weren’t doing their job, and that means the player council wasn’t doing it’s job . If they’re going to the trouble of ousting de Villiers, the players might want to fix that before the next CEO comes on board.

It’s time for the ATP Fantasy Tennis Season so check out our Fantasy Tennis Guide. You’ll find Fast Facts, Strategies, and Statistics to help you play the game.

Sign up and join our subleague! It’s called tennisdiary.com. We send weekly email updates to all subleague members before the submission deadline.

Pay attention because this week’s submission deadline is Sunday morning, June 15, 4am (EST) in the U.S./10am (CET) in Europe.

The top players are resting before the start of Wimbledon next week except for David Ferrer and Richard Gasquet. Ferrer skipped the grass this week and Gasquet started the recovery from his confidence crisis with a quarterfinal finish at Queen’s Club. They are the top two seeds at s’Hertogenbosch. The other tournament this week is Nottingham which also has a few good players and would have featured Andy Murray too if he hadn’t fallen on his thumb at Queen’s.

We need eight players for our team so let’s pick four players from each draw, in other words, the semifinalists.

Nottingham (grass, first prize: $90,923)
s-Hertogenbosch (grass, first prize: $90,923)

David Ferrer is the top seed in s’Hertogenbosch but Mario Ancic is in his quarter and that’s bad news. Ancic reached the third round at Queen’s this week and he went 9-1 on grass two years ago after missing the grass court season last year due to mononucleosis. Ferrer, on the other hand, has won four matches on grass in the last two years. I’m going with Ancic.

The next quarter is a real mess. Jarkko Nieminen reached the semifinals at Halle last year. Arnaud Clement reached the semifinals at Queen’s and the final at Notthingham last year. Michael Berrer reached the quarterfinals here last year as a qualifier. Juan Martin Del Potro also reached the quarterfinals but the highest ranked player he beat was number 92.

Clement isn’t doing well on grass this year. He lost to the 153rd ranked player at the Surbiton challenger and to Andreas Seppi in the first round at Queen’s. And his ranking has dropped from the 30’s this time last year to the 80’s. Nieminen lost to the 97th ranked player in the first round at Halle this week. Instead, I’m picking Fabrice Santoro because he’s having a more consistent year than any player in this quarter on faster courts and he’s a decent grass court player.

Ivan Ljubicic is in the next quarter and he won this tournament last year. Robin Haase is a player waiting to break out. He beat Ljubicic at the Australian Open this year and he already has three quarterfinal finishes on faster surfaces but he’s 1-3 lifetime on grass so I’m going with Ljubicic over Haase and Guillermo Canas.

Assuming that grass has revitalized Richard Gasquet, he’s a good pick here because he has two titles and one quarterfinal finish at Nottingham in the last three years. But should you save him for later? Remember, you can only use a player five times in one season. I’ve used him twice already and I want to save him for Wimbledon and the U.S. Open and he can probably make a whole lot more money at one of the Masters Series events or a hard court fall event. So I’m not going to use him and you should save him for at least three more events this year. Igor Andreev hasn’t won a match on grass in three years but it’s not as bad as it looks. He only played two matches in that time period and lost those to James Blake and Gael Monfils. Overall he’s 8-8 on grass with victories over Gasquet and Andre Agassi so I’m going with him.

Radek Stepanek is the top seed at Nottingham. He reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 2006 but he didn’t do much on grass last year and he lost to Tommy Haas – who just returned from injury – in the first round at Halle week. Julien Benneteau is in this quarter and he did reach the semifinals here last year, but that was the only time he’s gone past the second round on grass. He lost this week in the first round to Philipp Kohlschreiber in Halle but Kohlschreiber is in the final so that doesn’t tell us much. Grass tournaments are tough to pick because there are so few of them so we don’t have much to go on, but I’m picking Gael Monfils to come out of Stepanek’s quarter because he has a better record on grass in the past year.

Ivo Karlovic tops the next quarter and he won this event last year but he has some competition. Jonas Bjorkman reached the semifinals here last year and Andreas Seppi reached the same round two years ago. Still, looking at those 35 aces and three tiebreakers again Rafael Nadal in Queen’s last week, Karlovic is my pick.

The next quarter is a tough call because both Robin Soderling and Nicolas Mahut are there. Soderling reached the quarterfinals at Halle this week and the third round at Wimbledon last year. Mahut reached the quarterfinals at Queen’s this week and also reached the third round at Wimbledon last year. I’m giving Soderling the slightest edge because he beat Mahut here two years ago. They won’t meet till the quarterfinals, though, so either one could be a good choice.

Dmitry Tursunov and Paul-Henri Mathieu are by far the strongest players in the bottom quarter and it’s a tough call because Tursunov beat Mathieu at Queen’s last year, but they’re pretty evenly matched on grass. Tursunov lost in the first round at Halle this week but he had the misfortune of drawing Mikhail Youzhny. I’m taking Tursunov because he had a slightly better grass court record than Mathieu last year.

Picks

Here are my picks for this week: Ancic, Santoro, Ljubicic, Andreev, Monfils, Karlovic, Soderling, and Tursunov.

Happy fantasies!