matchstat.com<\/a> in addition to the ATP website to help you make picks because they give results by surface. If you do, you’ll see that Ivan Ljubicic has never made it past the second round of a grass court tournament. Strange considering how big his serve is but then, he’s not the best mover in the world. Ditto for Davydenko, he’s gone past the first round exactly once. No matter, we’re saving him for hard court Masters Series events not these piddling $100,000 Wimbldon tuneups.<\/p>\nFirst let’s look at Halle. Ignore Federer, of course he’ll win but you can’t pick him for such small change.<\/p>\n
I have Schuettler over Baghdatis because Schuettler got to the third round here last year and he has a 4-3 head-to-head record over Tommy Haas but Haas won the last three, so it’s Haas to the quarterfinals.<\/p>\n
Mikhail Youzhny is 3-0 over Nicolas Kiefer including one match on hardcourts at the 2004 Olympics. Head-to-head over rankings, I say. It’s hard to pick Berdych and Youzhny because Berdych is so annoyingly unpredictable but I have to pick someone so Berdych it is.<\/p>\n
As for Queens, let’s hope Nadal doesn’t take that money but there’s not much chance of it. I couldn’t believe people were talking about Nadal’s chances at Wimbledon considering Nadal has only reached the third round at the US Open. First things first please. I’m riding Roddick through every grass tournament he enters because I don’t want to suffer through his angst at hard court tournaments and I saw him hit a couple of 150 mph serves in Davis Cup against Chile.<\/p>\n
It’s interesting to note that Jarkko Nieminen and Tomas Berdych have never met in an ATP event though Berdych turned pro four years ago and Nieminen six years ago. That’s how far flung the tennis world is and how hard it is to build allegiance to players or develop rivalries. You’d be surprised how low the head-to-head numbers are in general and this is a good example of it.<\/p>\n
In this week’s New Yorker there’s a cartoon with a tortoise in the foreground and another tortoise walking towards it. The little thought bubble above first tortoise’s head says, “Ah, this must be my 2006.” Not my 2 o’clock appointment or my Tuesday appointment but my yearly appointment because that’s how slow the tortoise world goes. But it’s worse in the ATP. In 2002, Berdych might just as well have said to Nieminem, “Ah, you must be my 2006,” because that’s how long it took before they will finally play each other in a match.<\/p>\n
Blake vs. Ljubicic is hard to pick because Ljubicic is 5-o over Blake but Ljubicic, as I said, is fairly hopeless on grass. Then again, Blake hasn’t done well on grass the last few years either and he lost both grass matches in the Davis Cup match against Chile. That 5-0 head-to-head is too much to ignore even if it does put Ljubicic in the – gulp – semifinals.<\/p>\n
Thomas Johansson is 5-0 against Mirnyi but it’s hard to know if his eye has recovered enough to play on grass. Shouldn’t matter, he’s in Hewitt’s part of the draw and I’m riding Hewitt until I’m convinced he really wants to play this year.<\/p>\n
Back to tortoise land. Andre Agassi has been on the tour for twenty years, Tim Henman for thirteen, and they’ve played a grand total of three times, the last time six years ago. Boy, I’d hate to be a handicapper for tennis at a Las Vegas gambling house. Every other sport has enough head-to-head statistics to employ a few hundred statisticians fulltime. I know of a baseball fantasy league player who works with a statistician at the Jet Propulsion Lab. If I hired a statistician, she’d spend all of her time projecting statistics instead of manipulating them because there aren’t many to be had in tennis. It’s hard to pick Agassi and Henman because who knows what condition Agassi is in but neither one is going far this week so I won’t worry about it.<\/p>\n
Radek Stepanek was in the semifinals here last year but Dimitri Tursunov got to the fourth round at Wimbledon. I don’t have to tell you that they’ve never played each other. Stepanek is having a better year so I’ll take him. Grosjean is 28-9 on grass, I’m taking him.<\/p>\n
My final team: Roddick, Grosjean, Hewitt, Ljubicic, Stepanek, Haas, Tursunov, Berdych. Doubles: Bjorkman and Mirnyi.<\/p>\n
Oy, I’m exhausted. Enough already. I’m tired of hearing players say they get a message every day, I think I deserve that too.<\/p>\n
Please post your choices and feel free to tell me if you think I’m full of it.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I don’t see how the players do it. Federer has a 3pm practice session in Halle tomorrow afternoon and that’s bad enough but how am I suppose to immediately switch into grass mode after two exhausting weeks of tracking long clay court matches? This week there are two tournaments, Halle and Queens, and Queens has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=370"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/370\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}