{"id":553,"date":"2007-03-20T11:26:43","date_gmt":"2007-03-20T19:26:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/?p=553"},"modified":"2007-03-20T11:26:43","modified_gmt":"2007-03-20T19:26:43","slug":"2007-indian-wells-the-tripleheader-that-wasnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/2007-indian-wells-the-tripleheader-that-wasnt\/","title":{"rendered":"2007 Indian Wells: the tripleheader that wasn\u2019t"},"content":{"rendered":"

All credit to Roddick for climbing back to number three after a horrible start last year but how does he move forward now? <\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My gracious hosts Here at Indian Wells wanted to know what time I would be home for dinner. I told them not to hold dinner for me, there were two men\u2019s semifinals and a women\u2019s final to be played this afternoon and I expected to be at the stadium for a good seven or eight hours.<\/p>\n

I was wrong. I could have been home for dinner by six and that is not a good thing.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, Bill Simons of Inside Tennis<\/a> asked Rafael Nadal an interesting question. He wondered if Nadal was getting too comfortable with his number two ranking. Did he still have a burning desire to be number one? It took a few people to successfully translate the question into Spanish but Nadal finally answered that he was comfortable with number two because he didn\u2019t see an opportunity to be number one but his goal, of course, is to be number one.<\/p>\n

Andy Roddick will now have to decide how comfortable he is at number three because he lost badly to Nadal in the first semifinal today, 6-4, 6-3. Roddick is more than a thousand points behind Nadal in the ATP rankings and less than one hundred in front of Nikolay Davydenko so Simon\u2019s question is important because this is competitive sports, if you\u2019re not moving forward then you\u2019re probably slipping backwards.<\/p>\n

All credit to Roddick for climbing back to number three after a horrible start last year but how does he move forward now? Some of his problems today were temporary. During the three games he lost his serve, he got a total of three first serves into the court. And some problems need fixing.<\/p>\n

I said Roddick would have problems later in the week if he tried to serve and volley because those higher ranked guys hit very good passing shots. But he also had trouble getting to the net because Nadal\u2019s topspin kicked up and kept him behind the baseline. Roddick realizes he has to do something. After the match he said:<\/p>\n

I mean, we were talking about it, Jimmy (Connors) and I just now, and we said, you know, we\u2019re going to have to go back and look at this match and really kind of think about what we would try to do a little bit differently.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nadal said he had his best match of the year today and clearly Roddick did not so the gap isn\u2019t as wide as it looked, but this is the era of the supercoach and I\u2019m looking forward to seeing what Connors comes up with next. After Andy Murray dismantled Tommy Haas in the quarterfinals last night you have to appreciate Murray and his coach Brad Gilbert. We know Gilbert can coach a player to number one, he did it with Andre Agassi, and it\u2019ll be fun to see how Connors deals with the challenge.<\/p>\n

Both women\u2019s finalists, Daniela Hantuchova and Svetlana Kuznetsova, suffered from early success. Hantuchova won the title here in 2002 and hadn\u2019t won a tournament since. Kuznetsova won the 2004 US Open and reached a career high number four then had a terrible 2005 before winning Miami and getting to the French Open final last year. She is now back at number four.<\/p>\n

This tournament has been a bit of a letdown because Justine Henin and Amelie Mauresmo are not here and Maria Sharapova went out early. Kuznetsova explained it like this: \u201c\u2026Justine, Amelie, they were not here this week. And then, afterwards, other top players that lose early. And, for me, not to make the final would feel very low. At least I made it, you know.\u201d And maybe that was the problem, being satisfied with the final, because she had trouble keeping the ball in the court and she let Hantuchova dictate the match with aggressive play.<\/p>\n

And maybe Kuznetsova is too comfortable at number four. Look at this exchange:<\/p>\n

Q. Svetlans, does this sort of take \u2026a little bit of pressure off you going into the next week where you\u2019ve got all winners points to defend? [remember, Kuznetsova won the title at Miami last year]<\/em>Kuznetsova: Yeah, definitely, definitely it\u2019s easier. I mean, you know, otherwise, I always defend all the points, you know. So it\u2019s much easier to me next week.<\/em>When you win a tournament on the professional tennis tour, you have to come back and win it again next year else your ranking is likely to drop. The pressure only increases, it never really decreases. That\u2019s why very few people are well equipped for this job. Hantuchova got the second title of her career today winning it 6-3, 6-4. Five years after her first title she\u2019s much better prepared for the job.<\/em>The last match of the day featured the two best young players on the ATP tour: Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic. Murray is ranked number fourteen and Djokovic thirteen. Their games and their temperaments are very different and it should have been fun to see them slug it out on the hard court but it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

<\/em>Murray hurt his ankle and his hip during his win over Tommy Haas in the quarterfinals last night but he played today because he was told he couldn\u2019t hurt himself further. He had second thoughts about it after the match:<\/p>\n

I had a bit of an unprofessional decision on my part to have gone on. You know, I guess the older you get, the more you learn that it\u2019s not always about just going.<\/em><\/p>\n

Murray couldn\u2019t move and that\u2019s the biggest part of his game. Djokovic won the match easily, 6-2, 6-3, and moved himself into the top ten for the first time in his career.<\/p>\n

The cafeteria closes during the last game of the last match. After Djokovic won his fourth game in the last set I knew it would be over pretty quickly so I took off to get my dinner much earlier than I thought I would.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All credit to Roddick for climbing back to number three after a horrible start last year but how does he move forward now? My gracious hosts Here at Indian Wells wanted to know what time I would be home for dinner. I told them not to hold dinner for me, there were two men\u2019s semifinals […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,21,96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ams-indian-wells","category-atp-players","category-wta-players"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553","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=553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}