Juan Martin Del Potro beat David Nalbandian in Madrid and may be on the way to passing him in the rankings too.<\/b>.<\/p>\n
<\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/p>\nJuan Martin Del Potro<\/b> broke David Nalbandian<\/b> in the first game of their match in the Masters Series event in Madrid with a running passing shot down the line. Nalbandian had run Del Potro to one side of the court then the other and come to the net, but he gave up on the passing shot because he didn\u2019t think it was going in. He knows how good Del Potro is, we all do, but Del Potro shot into the top ten so quickly that we\u2019re all having trouble really believing it.<\/p>\nEleven players have won four titles as teenagers and 10 of them went on to reach the number one ranking. I wonder which one didn\u2019t reach number one. Anyone know? Any guesses?<\/p>\nI do know that none of them won their first four tournaments in a row as Del Potro did this summer and that was the shocking thing. This spring I was wondering what had happened to Del Potro. I knew he was tall and he had a killer backhand, but I\u2019d been following the other young players Andy Murray<\/b> and Novak Djokovic<\/b> and for good reason. Djokovic won a slam and Murray has been in the top 20 for much of the year while Del Potro was ranked number 81 at one point this year.<\/p>\nBy the time Del Potro got to Los Angeles in early August, he\u2019d already won two tournaments in a row and we asked him, as often as we could and in as many different ways as we could: What happened? What did he do? What did he change? How did he explain his sudden run up the rankings? His English isn\u2019t great and he\u2019s not the most expansive talker so most of the answers were variations of this: I changed my coach and he changed my conditioning.<\/p>\nThat second one is a biggie because Del Potro is the king of match retirements – I stopped counting them already – and one of them was highly consequential. His retirement against James Blake<\/b> in the Las Vegas round robin event last year toned the death knell for round robin events when ATP CEO Etienne de Villiers<\/b> momentarily passed Blake onto the next round despite the fact that he hadn\u2019t won enough games to advance because Del Potro retired. This pissed everyone off and showed that de Villiers didn’t understand the format he’d introduced to the tour. Thanks a lot Juan Martin, I actually loved round robins. It’s all your fault!<\/p>\nHis new coach may have improved Del Potro\u2019s conditioning but I did notice that he took off for Argentina and skipped both Masters Series events in Toronto and Cincinnati after winning those two clay court events in Europe. He also gave Philipp Kohlschreiber<\/b> a walkover in Vienna last week because he split a toenail.<\/p>\nDel Potro is a fragile guy physically and much of his maturity has been a process of coming into his body. He\u2019s 6\u20196\u201d (198cm) and he\u2019s had breathing issues and other niggling problems but no big injuries, just enough to knock him out of a tournament one week and let him turn up the next week to try again. It\u2019s almost as if someone came along and tied him to one of those stretching racks you see in old horror movies and then slowly turned the crank over the period of a few years. Along the way, each little bit of his body had to fill out and adjust to every new inch and there were some aches and pains along the way, but when he reached his final height, he popped off that stretching rack and out of the lab and, bam!, he won four straight tournaments and he hasn\u2019t stopped climbing the rankings yet.<\/p>\nNalbandian hit an approach into the net to lose a second service game and go down 0-3. He got one of those breaks back but Del Potro closed out the first set and he did it in style with a 22 stroke rally that looked like Nalbandian in his prime. You can see it at the end of the video above. He\u2019s not as strong as Nalbandian but he\u2019s got a better serve and he uses his height to smash winners at extreme angles.<\/p>\nI\u2019m curious about the relationship between Del Potro and Nalbandian. Del Potro hit a shot right at Nalbandian\u2019s body in the first set \u2013 Nalbandian threw him a look – and their post-match meeting at the net was cursory at best. It\u2019s certainly not the same relationship that Carlos Moya<\/b> has with his young charge and fellow Davis Cup teammate Rafael Nadal<\/b> and that\u2019s a bit surprising because Del Potro is the bright young light of Nalbandian\u2019s Argentina and these days, players are so loved dovey with each other that I expected a bit more love at the net. And Moya doesn\u2019t seem to begrudge Nadal his success even though Moya is slipping down the rankings at this point in his career.<\/p>\nIf Nalbandian were a bit jealous of Del Potro, I’d understand because Del Potro has done the one thing that always frustrated us about Nalbandian \u2013 win tournaments. Four years after Nalbandian won his first title, he had five titles to his name and none of them were Masters Series events except for the Tennis Masters Cup in 2005, the highlight of his career. This is the sixth straight year he\u2019s spent significant time in the top ten and he has one slam final to show for it plus the Madrid and Paris title last year.<\/p>\nDel Potro started the second set off the same way he started the first set, with a break of serve, this time on a Nalbandian error. Nalbandian gave him another break on a double fault to put Del Potro up 5-2 and that was that.<\/p>\nIn the past four years Nalbandian had two semifinals, a final, and a title in Madrid, but his string of good results ended today and it was a significant event. He beat Del Potro here last year in their only previous meeting. Nalbandian said that his focus at the moment is preparing for the Davis Cup final against Spain to be held in Argentina after the Tennis Masters Cup. Del Potro was the Argentinean who won both his matches in the Davis Cup semifinals this year, not Nalbandian, and it\u2019s likely that trend will continue.<\/p>\nWill Del Potro go with the odds and make it to number one at some point in his career? In the immediate future he\u2019d have to overtake Rafael Nadal<\/b>, Roger Federer<\/b>, Novak Djokovic<\/b> \u2013 who lost to Ivo Karlovic<\/b> today and may have blown his chance at overtaking Federer this year, and Andy Murray<\/b>.<\/p>\nDel Potro will outlast Federer, he\u2019s better on clay than Murray, and he has a chance to be almost as consistent as Djokovic on all surfaces \u2013 two of Del Potro\u2019s four wins this year were on clay, two on outdoor hard court. So I\u2019ll say he can sneak into the number one ranking for at least a week over those three players. I\u2019m also going to say that this was a career year for Nadal and though he\u2019ll hold onto the number one ranking for a while, it won\u2019t be the five years that Federer held it.<\/p>\nI know your answer already Sakhi, and I\u2019ve already lost enough bets with you, but I\u2019m going with a yes on this guy. Del Potro will find himself at number one at some point in his career. If 10 out of 11 players who won four events as teenagers reached number one, those odds are too good to pass up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Juan Martin Del Potro beat David Nalbandian in Madrid and may be on the way to passing him in the rankings too.. Juan Martin Del Potro broke David Nalbandian in the first game of their match in the Masters Series event in Madrid with a running passing shot down the line. Nalbandian had run Del […]<\/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-964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964","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=964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Juan Martin Del Potro<\/b> broke David Nalbandian<\/b> in the first game of their match in the Masters Series event in Madrid with a running passing shot down the line. Nalbandian had run Del Potro to one side of the court then the other and come to the net, but he gave up on the passing shot because he didn\u2019t think it was going in. He knows how good Del Potro is, we all do, but Del Potro shot into the top ten so quickly that we\u2019re all having trouble really believing it.<\/p>\n
Eleven players have won four titles as teenagers and 10 of them went on to reach the number one ranking. I wonder which one didn\u2019t reach number one. Anyone know? Any guesses?<\/p>\n
I do know that none of them won their first four tournaments in a row as Del Potro did this summer and that was the shocking thing. This spring I was wondering what had happened to Del Potro. I knew he was tall and he had a killer backhand, but I\u2019d been following the other young players Andy Murray<\/b> and Novak Djokovic<\/b> and for good reason. Djokovic won a slam and Murray has been in the top 20 for much of the year while Del Potro was ranked number 81 at one point this year.<\/p>\n
By the time Del Potro got to Los Angeles in early August, he\u2019d already won two tournaments in a row and we asked him, as often as we could and in as many different ways as we could: What happened? What did he do? What did he change? How did he explain his sudden run up the rankings? His English isn\u2019t great and he\u2019s not the most expansive talker so most of the answers were variations of this: I changed my coach and he changed my conditioning.<\/p>\n
That second one is a biggie because Del Potro is the king of match retirements – I stopped counting them already – and one of them was highly consequential. His retirement against James Blake<\/b> in the Las Vegas round robin event last year toned the death knell for round robin events when ATP CEO Etienne de Villiers<\/b> momentarily passed Blake onto the next round despite the fact that he hadn\u2019t won enough games to advance because Del Potro retired. This pissed everyone off and showed that de Villiers didn’t understand the format he’d introduced to the tour. Thanks a lot Juan Martin, I actually loved round robins. It’s all your fault!<\/p>\n
His new coach may have improved Del Potro\u2019s conditioning but I did notice that he took off for Argentina and skipped both Masters Series events in Toronto and Cincinnati after winning those two clay court events in Europe. He also gave Philipp Kohlschreiber<\/b> a walkover in Vienna last week because he split a toenail.<\/p>\n
Del Potro is a fragile guy physically and much of his maturity has been a process of coming into his body. He\u2019s 6\u20196\u201d (198cm) and he\u2019s had breathing issues and other niggling problems but no big injuries, just enough to knock him out of a tournament one week and let him turn up the next week to try again. It\u2019s almost as if someone came along and tied him to one of those stretching racks you see in old horror movies and then slowly turned the crank over the period of a few years. Along the way, each little bit of his body had to fill out and adjust to every new inch and there were some aches and pains along the way, but when he reached his final height, he popped off that stretching rack and out of the lab and, bam!, he won four straight tournaments and he hasn\u2019t stopped climbing the rankings yet.<\/p>\n
Nalbandian hit an approach into the net to lose a second service game and go down 0-3. He got one of those breaks back but Del Potro closed out the first set and he did it in style with a 22 stroke rally that looked like Nalbandian in his prime. You can see it at the end of the video above. He\u2019s not as strong as Nalbandian but he\u2019s got a better serve and he uses his height to smash winners at extreme angles.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m curious about the relationship between Del Potro and Nalbandian. Del Potro hit a shot right at Nalbandian\u2019s body in the first set \u2013 Nalbandian threw him a look – and their post-match meeting at the net was cursory at best. It\u2019s certainly not the same relationship that Carlos Moya<\/b> has with his young charge and fellow Davis Cup teammate Rafael Nadal<\/b> and that\u2019s a bit surprising because Del Potro is the bright young light of Nalbandian\u2019s Argentina and these days, players are so loved dovey with each other that I expected a bit more love at the net. And Moya doesn\u2019t seem to begrudge Nadal his success even though Moya is slipping down the rankings at this point in his career.<\/p>\n
If Nalbandian were a bit jealous of Del Potro, I’d understand because Del Potro has done the one thing that always frustrated us about Nalbandian \u2013 win tournaments. Four years after Nalbandian won his first title, he had five titles to his name and none of them were Masters Series events except for the Tennis Masters Cup in 2005, the highlight of his career. This is the sixth straight year he\u2019s spent significant time in the top ten and he has one slam final to show for it plus the Madrid and Paris title last year.<\/p>\n
Del Potro started the second set off the same way he started the first set, with a break of serve, this time on a Nalbandian error. Nalbandian gave him another break on a double fault to put Del Potro up 5-2 and that was that.<\/p>\n
In the past four years Nalbandian had two semifinals, a final, and a title in Madrid, but his string of good results ended today and it was a significant event. He beat Del Potro here last year in their only previous meeting. Nalbandian said that his focus at the moment is preparing for the Davis Cup final against Spain to be held in Argentina after the Tennis Masters Cup. Del Potro was the Argentinean who won both his matches in the Davis Cup semifinals this year, not Nalbandian, and it\u2019s likely that trend will continue.<\/p>\n
Will Del Potro go with the odds and make it to number one at some point in his career? In the immediate future he\u2019d have to overtake Rafael Nadal<\/b>, Roger Federer<\/b>, Novak Djokovic<\/b> \u2013 who lost to Ivo Karlovic<\/b> today and may have blown his chance at overtaking Federer this year, and Andy Murray<\/b>.<\/p>\n
Del Potro will outlast Federer, he\u2019s better on clay than Murray, and he has a chance to be almost as consistent as Djokovic on all surfaces \u2013 two of Del Potro\u2019s four wins this year were on clay, two on outdoor hard court. So I\u2019ll say he can sneak into the number one ranking for at least a week over those three players. I\u2019m also going to say that this was a career year for Nadal and though he\u2019ll hold onto the number one ranking for a while, it won\u2019t be the five years that Federer held it.<\/p>\n
I know your answer already Sakhi, and I\u2019ve already lost enough bets with you, but I\u2019m going with a yes on this guy. Del Potro will find himself at number one at some point in his career. If 10 out of 11 players who won four events as teenagers reached number one, those odds are too good to pass up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Juan Martin Del Potro beat David Nalbandian in Madrid and may be on the way to passing him in the rankings too.. Juan Martin Del Potro broke David Nalbandian in the first game of their match in the Masters Series event in Madrid with a running passing shot down the line. Nalbandian had run Del […]<\/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-964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964","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=964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}