{"id":906,"date":"2008-06-14T11:52:18","date_gmt":"2008-06-14T19:52:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/?p=906"},"modified":"2008-06-14T11:52:18","modified_gmt":"2008-06-14T19:52:18","slug":"atp-fantasy-tennis-picks-for-nottingham-and-shertogenbosch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/atp-fantasy-tennis-picks-for-nottingham-and-shertogenbosch\/","title":{"rendered":"ATP Fantasy Tennis Picks for Nottingham and s\u2019Hertogenbosch"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s time for the ATP Fantasy Tennis Season<\/a> so check out our Fantasy Tennis Guide<\/a>. You\u2019ll find Fast Facts, Strategies, and Statistics to help you play the game.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Sign up<\/a> and join our subleague<\/a>! It\u2019s called tennisdiary.com. We send weekly email updates to all subleague members before the submission deadline.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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

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\u2019s Club. They are the top two seeds at s\u2019Hertogenbosch. The other tournament this week is Nottingham which also has a few good players and would have featured Andy Murray too if he hadn\u2019t fallen on his thumb at Queen’s.<\/p>\n

We need eight players for our team so let\u2019s pick four players from each draw, in other words, the semifinalists.<\/p>\n

Nottingham<\/a> (grass, first prize: $90,923)
\ns-Hertogenbosch<\/a> (grass, first prize: $90,923)<\/p>\n

David Ferrer is the top seed in s\u2019Hertogenbosch but Mario Ancic is in his quarter and that\u2019s bad news. Ancic reached the third round at Queen\u2019s 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\u2019m going with Ancic.<\/p>\n

The next quarter is a real mess. Jarkko Nieminen reached the semifinals at Halle last year. Arnaud Clement reached the semifinals at Queen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Clement isn\u2019t 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\u2019s. And his ranking has dropped from the 30\u2019s this time last year to the 80\u2019s. Nieminen lost to the 97th ranked player in the first round at Halle this week. Instead, I\u2019m picking Fabrice Santoro because he\u2019s having a more consistent year than any player in this quarter on faster courts and he\u2019s a decent grass court player.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 1-3 lifetime on grass so I\u2019m going with Ljubicic over Haase and Guillermo Canas.<\/p>\n

Assuming that grass has revitalized Richard Gasquet, he\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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\u2019m not going to use him and you should save him for at least three more events this year. Igor Andreev hasn\u2019t won a match on grass in three years but it\u2019s 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\u2019s 8-8 on grass with victories over Gasquet and Andre Agassi so I\u2019m going with him.<\/p>\n

Radek Stepanek is the top seed at Nottingham. He reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 2006 but he didn\u2019t do much on grass last year and he lost to Tommy Haas \u2013 who just returned from injury \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019t tell us much. Grass tournaments are tough to pick because there are so few of them so we don\u2019t have much to go on, but I\u2019m picking Gael Monfils to come out of Stepanek\u2019s quarter because he has a better record on grass in the past year.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s last week, Karlovic is my pick.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s this week and also reached the third round at Wimbledon last year. I\u2019m giving Soderling the slightest edge because he beat Mahut here two years ago. They won\u2019t meet till the quarterfinals, though, so either one could be a good choice.<\/p>\n

Dmitry Tursunov and Paul-Henri Mathieu are by far the strongest players in the bottom quarter and it\u2019s a tough call because Tursunov beat Mathieu at Queen\u2019s last year, but they\u2019re 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\u2019m taking Tursunov because he had a slightly better grass court record than Mathieu last year.<\/p>\n

Picks<\/b><\/p>\n

Here are my picks for this week: Ancic, Santoro, Ljubicic, Andreev, Monfils, Karlovic, Soderling, and Tursunov.<\/p>\n

Happy fantasies!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s time for the ATP Fantasy Tennis Season so check out our Fantasy Tennis Guide. You\u2019ll find Fast Facts, Strategies, and Statistics to help you play the game. Sign up and join our subleague! It\u2019s called tennisdiary.com. We send weekly email updates to all subleague members before the submission deadline. Pay attention because this week’s […]<\/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-906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}