One for two is not bad.

Nalbandian took Estoril and is now ranked a career high number three. In Munich, Oliver Rochus beat his best friend Kristof Vliegen, which doesn’t affect the fantasy season that much for most people.

Here you go, the final tally.

ESTORIL OPEN

BMW OPEN – MUNICH

One upset on the day – remember, an upset here is any result that disagrees with my pick. Just when I thought the tall one was ready to roll into the semis – I was looking forward to seeing six-foot-ten Ivo Karlovic play five-foot-five Olivier Rochus – Jurgen Melzer interfered.

Rochus and Karlovic have played each other four times. Rochus is ahead 3-1 in the series but what is really, really strange is that Rochus beat Karlovic on hard court twice, grass (!) once, and lost his only match to Karlovic on clay. O.k., the clay court match was in a futures tournament in 2000 but the grass court match was last year in Nottingham. How did that happen? Karlovic’s serve should have rocketed past the outstretched arms of the small one.

I already had Rochus through to the final and I’ll stick with it but I’m nervous about this pick because Melzer has a 3-2 record over Rochus and won the two matches on clay. But both clay victories were in his home country of Austria and Rochus is ranked forty points higher. That should count for something.

By rights, Carolos Moya should easily beat Davidenko. Moya has won a title at Monte Carlo, Estoril, Barcelona, and Rome and has a 4-0 record against Davydenko, including three matches on clay. Oh, and then there was that French Open title in 1998. Meanwhile, this is Davydenko’s fourth clay court tournament of the year and it’s the first time he’s gone past the second round. Still, Moya is not a sure thing any more on any surface and I think this might be the day that Davydenko gets his first victory in the series.

Kristof Vliegen beat Jarkko Nieminen in the first round at Monte Carlo but Nieminen got to the quarterfinals in Barcelona – where he lost to Rafael Nadal. I have no idea who’s going to win but I’ll keep Nieminen in the finals only because I’m too lazy to change my pick.

By the way, there is an ATP injury list here. You’ll notice that there are twenty-five injuries labeled as unknown including three for Raemon Sluiter and one for Tommy Haas. Can you imagine a baseball player going on the injured list with an unknown injury? Does the ATP have any control over players pulling out of tournaments or is “unknown” now an acceptable injury category?

(names in blue are my predictions)
ESTORIL OPEN

BMW OPEN – MUNICH

Estoril and Munich completed their second rounds on Thursday with only one upset. By upset I mean a result at odds with my pick. Finally, some success.

Portuguese player Frederico Gil – Estoril is in Portugal by the way – is ranked number 246 and beat Dmitri Tursunov. I suppose you could call it an upset since Tursunov is ranked number 33, but Tursunov has moved past the second round in exactly one clay court tournament in his career: Houston in 2004. As we always say here, Houston doesn’t count because the European players skip it.

Fantasy tennis is an obsession, there are probably few concrete reasons to recommend it, but I will say that you learn a lot more about every player in the draw than you ever wanted to know. Tursunov, it turns out, was born in Moscow but lives in Roseville, California. I live in California and I’ve never heard of it. Roseville is next to Citrus Heights which is next to Sacramento, the state capital. Tursunove moved to the U.S. when he was twelve years old which might explain why he has taken the tennis world by storm this week with his ATP blog. No wonder his English is so good.

Tursunov is based at the Higueras-Gorin Tennis Academy in the Sacramento area. Guillermo Coria has just started to work with Jose Higueras which might explain why Coria recently moved to Palm Springs. Living in California is a good idea but who wants to live in Sacramento?

We don’t want to forget the women altogether. The match of the week was Venus Williams vs. Martina Hingis. It was fascinating for a few reasons. This is the first time they’ve met since Hingis rejoined the tour and it’s only Venus’ second tournament of the year. Venus managed to beat Hingis in three sets. Venus’ achilles heel has always been her second serve but it’s a laser compared to Hingis’. I’d love to see Hingis’ serving statistics but the WTA is far behind the ATP when it comes to stats unless it’s a grand slam tournament or a combined tournament. Once the match is removed from the live scores window, the stats are gone.

The WTA also does not have a simple stats page nor anything like the ATP Vault, a database of past tournaments with results including challenger and future events. Memo to the WTA: If you want tennis journalists to write about your game, give them something to work with. Statistics would be a good start. Hint: look at the ATP’s site for starters.

That’s enough complaining for one day. Here are the current draws for Estoril and Munich.

(names in blue are my predictions)
ESTORIL OPEN

BMW OPEN – MUNICH

The rules should be changed to help me, of course. A semifinalist and quarterfinalist in my Estoril draw, Nicolas Almagro and Tommy Robredo, dropped out after the first match of the tournament which is the deadline for substitutions in the ATP Fantasy League. Both players were scheduled to play on the second day of the tournament.

There’s luck in any game, if Kobe Bryant goes down with a sprained ankle, there goes the Lakers, but we should be able to make a substitution any time before a player’s first match.

There’s luck in any game, if Kobe Bryant goes down with a sprained ankle, there goes the Lakers, but we should be able to make a substitution any time before a player’s first match. That would keep us glued to the tournament website and could even result in endless calls to tournament directors for the latest injury list. Our behavior might start to look very similar to that strange animal known as a baseball fantasy league team owner.

Who knows, the interactivity of tennis fantasy teams could provoke an interest in tennis that other forms of exposure haven’t yet produced. In the recent past, sports mania has always been driven by star power but many young sports addicts get their fix playing video games, not watching games.

I don’t have a percentage for the number of baseball websites driven by fantasy league players but I know that Most Valuable Network, and most other sports networks, have a section devoted entirely to baseball transactions such as players who go on and off the injury list or are optioned to the minor leagues. When we get a site devoted entirely to tennis injuries and pullouts, then we’ll know that we’re a major sport.

Am I delusional or not? Will fantasy leagues increase the popularity of tennis? What do you think?

When we get a site devoted entirely to tennis injuries and pullouts, then we’ll know that we’re a major sport.

Almagro and Robredo are gone due to back problems and abdominals. Basically, it’s called too much tennis. Look at the ATP schedule. Coming up are two Masters Series tournaments in a row, Rome and Hamburg. Three times in a season two big tournaments follow one another. Rome and Hamburg, Toronto and Cincinatti, and, at the end of the season, the Paris Masters is followed by the year-end championships. If you’re one of the eight players in the year-end championship, why risk playing Paris? How else do you think Tomas Berdych got his first Masters win and how often will Ivan Ljubicic let such a golden opportunity slip through his hands?

Anyway, back to Estoril. With Robredo out, Moya should get an easy path to the quarters and meet Safin. That’s a real bonus to Moya because neither Safin – or Davydenko if I’m wrong – should be Moya’s equal on clay.

Muller beat Rochus surprisingly and Muller vs. Lapentti is hard to call. Lapentti is on the down side and Muller is rather hopeless on clay but I went with youth. Unless Muller has one of his once-a-year brilliant games in the third round and gets to the quarters, it won’t matter much.

Hopefully Moya can do much better than Guillermo Coria. My team member and the number one seed at Munich was beaten by German qualifier Denis Gremelmayr. Coria’s battle with his serve has hit rock bottom, he had seventeen double faults. Maybe he should hire Elena Dementieva to teach him how to win with 17 double faults.

Not only that but Tommy Haas lost to Ivo Karlovic, Mikhail Youzhny lost to Jurgen Melzer, and Mario Ancic lost to Philipp Kohlschreiber. Have I somehow entered a parallel universe where everything is backwards? Where the number eighty-six player is better than the number nineteen player?

The reworked Estoril and Munich draws are below. As always, chime in.

(names in blue are my predictions)
ESTORIL OPEN

BMW OPEN – MUNICH