TENNIS SEASON ENDING EXTRAVAGANZAS 2006

really bad draw for Hingis and Dementieva - i wouldn't be surprised if either ended up as the doormat of her group (yet again for Dementieva, sadly). very impressed that Hingis even made it here after her first year back but her record against the top players this season has been rather woeful. that said, Mauresmo has been pretty terrible since Wimbledon, JHH hasn't played since the US Open, and despite her new-found consistency I still don't quite trust Nadia in big matches.

Sharapova has been quietly dominant since Wimbledon - only lost one match since then! (albeit to Dementieva.) that said if Kuznetsova plays her best I totally rate her above Sharapova.

it's pretty wide open once all the form/head to head/injury/talent factors are taken into question!

oh yeah, this will also determine whether Mauresmo, Henin-Hardenne or Sharapova ends the year as no 1.

oh yes the ballboys this year are actually male models! hand-picked by Sharapova herself! none of them very good looking unfortunately. Dementieva is sniffy and says they will have to stop staring at the players and start watching the balls. Hingis is just like, "MEN? WHERE? LET ME AT 'EM"
Male models need to keep eye on the ball - Dementieva
By Simon Baskett

MADRID, Nov 6 (Reuters) - Male models being used as ball boys at this week's end-of-season WTA Championships need to keep their minds on the job and not be distracted by the female players, world number eight Elena Dementieva said on Monday.

"We were practising the other day and I don't think they really know what they have to do on the court because they are too busy watching the players," the 25-year-old Russian told reporters ahead of the Madrid event, which starts on Tuesday.

"We'll have to see if it will work out or not but I think it will be a distraction for them to do their job.

"I don't think that they realise what they have let themselves in for and that they will have to be very careful about what they are doing on the court.

"The players are so focused and sometimes they get crazy with the ball boys so they don't know what they will be facing in a couple of days."

Organisers decided to use male models as an answer to criticism over the use of female models as ball girls at the men's Madrid Masters.

Kim Clijsters, who won the tournament in 2002 and 2003, said the initiative had been a talking point among the eight players taking part.

"I was talking to Maria (Sharapova) in the taxi and she said they looked nice," the world number six said. "I'm excited about it, although it is going to be strange. As long as they do a good job, that is all that matters."

Belgian Justine Henin-Hardenne, who is bidding to wrap up the year-end number one spot at the Championships, joked that her husband had warned her to be on her best behaviour.
"I'm very excited but I'm married so I can look but not touch," she smiled.
Martina Hingis added it would give her a chance to get even with boyfriend Radek Stepanek, ranked 19 in the world.

"Radek played here in Madrid in the past so now it's my turn," she said.

I don't think Roddick will make it out of his group, whoever he gets. He only qualified thanks to that little three-week burst late in the US hardcourt season (Blake has, I think, had a much more impressive year all round). Davydenko the only threat to Fed, I think, unless Rafa hits form.

Roddick hasn't beaten a top 10 player all year - he peaked at the right time though, for a super-diluted masters series field and of course the us open final run. i'm not even that impressed by Blake either, he's consistehntly failed to perform well at the biggest tournaments and only just scraped into these championships. he's had a good year but the idea of him as a threat to win a slam is laughable (he's constantly referred to as a 'champion' in us news reports. champion of what? mickey mouse tournaments and losing five-setters?) Davydenko was SCARILY good last week in paris though. prior to this year i'd thought of him as an unspectacular grinder with an artificially high ranking due to the number of tournaments he played but he's really changed my mind this year.

DISCRIMINATION

Sharapova stomped on Dementieva as well but that is less of a shock and more routine everyday life.

JHH a break up in the third on Hingis in a match which I hope is doing something to redeem the state of women's tennis after those two blow-outs...

Sharapova needs to do better than JHH to get No 1 - if JHH loses her next two matches Sharapova needs to make the final; if JHH reaches the semis Sharapova needs to win it; if JHH makes the final she's No 1 regardless.

Mauresmo won two Slams, really Slams won is the ultimate benchmark of a season but she has been woeful since Wimbledon and hasn't been remotely dominant.

JHH made all four Slam finals - but she lost three of them, all against opponents she had a good record against, and didn't take her opportunities to make more career milestones (eg Full House of Slams at Wimbledon). i can't imagine she's satisfied with that. she was dominant in the first half of the year but as ever seemed to peter out in the second.

Sharapova has an inferior Slam record than either but has dominated in the second half of the year while they've floundered/not played. until tAugust she was def the tour's nearly-woman though.

now I don't know who I want to get through from that group, I love Hingis and Petrova and JHH...

Sharapova keeps improving so much.

Mauresmo nearly lets a 4-0 final set lead slip away but scrapes through against Hingis. JHH steps it up when it matters against Petrova. Clijsters absolutely thrashes Kuznetsova 6-1 6-1 - Sveta hang your head in shame.

JHH definitely through to the semis, Sharapova all but through. Last two spots entirely dependent on tonight's matches - only Petrova is definitely out...

Beats $harapova 6-2 7-6 and seals year-end No 1. Hurrah!

Other semi-final is Clijsters v Mauresmo, hope Mauresmo takes it. And then JHH can wreak her revenge for Wimbledon.

http://ludie.zandalea.net/13181.jpg

Into the final 6-2 3-6 6-3 over Clijsters - and it's the Francophone Final Mark III...

The men look like a cross between party apparatchniks and a Gary Numan convention. Davydenko ruins his chnace to look even creepier than normal by smiling.

Nadal-Blake and DavyD-RobRed today.

i really really want rafa to get hold of blake on a clay court so he can POUND THAT ASS.

not best pleased about ljubicic/roddick result either but i'm sure this is no surprise.

tiny head guy is nalbandian - odd as his head usually looks big and meaty in other photos but it looks like a blonde pea there.

didn't mention women's result due to going out late and staying there all weekend - a hand, please, for MME JUSTINE HENIN-HARDENNE and her straight-sets win over Amelie M. Amelie may have won two Slams but I think reaching all five major finals PLUS the fed cup final in one year is ample justification for Player Of The Year status.

end-of-year top 30 for the women (brackets where they were at the end of 2005):

1. Justine Henin-Hardenne (6)
2. Maria Sharapova (4)
3. Amélie Mauresmo (3)
4. Svetlana Kuznetsova (18)
5. Kim Clijsters (2)
6. Nadia Petrova (9)
7. Martina Hingis (-)
8. Elena Dementieva (8)
9. Patty Schnyder (7)
10. Nicole Vaidisova (15)
11. Dinara Safina (20)
12. Jelena Jankovic (22)
13. Anna Chakvetadze (32)
14. Ana Ivanovic (16)
15. Francesca Schiavone (13)
16. Anastasia Myskina (14)
17. Marion Bartoli (37)
18. Daniela Hantuchova (19)
19. Anna-Lena Groenefeld (21)
20. Shahar Peer (45)
21. Na Li (56)
22. Tatiana Golovin (24)
23. Katarina Srebotnik (27)
24. Vera Zvonareva (42)
25. Lindsay Davenport (1)
26. Ai Sugiyama (29)
27. Anabel Medina Garrigues (33)
28. Flavia Pennetta (23)
29. Samantha Stosur (46)
30. Maria Kirilenko (25)

(Federer won 4-6 7-6 6-4, saving three match points in the tiebreak, i think the word we are looking for is PHEW)

(Thanks for that website! The ATP site is a disaster at work, I don't know whether it's an IE issue or if it's partially blocked.)

ljub can't get through ahead of roddick (unless he beats federer HAHA) so all hopes now pinned on Fat Dave...

All is not lost - if Bandy beats Roddick in straight-sets, he finishes ahead of him, I think (1-2, 4/4s vs 1-2, 3/5s). Not sure what happens if he beats him in three...

So it's...

RF 2-0 4/2
AR 1-1 3/3
IL 1-1 3/3
DN 0-2 2/4

I'm presuming ties are split based on the head-to-head result but, in the case of a three-way tie (RF beats IL, DN beats AR), it's set %-age. And then game %-age?

davydenko a set up on blake right now.

Yes, I can't really be bothered doing the maths but I think Roddick is virtually certain of going through if RF beats IL and he takes a set off Bandy. Unless he loses 7-6 0-6 0-6 or something. His 6-1 set vs IL and Bandy's pair of 1-6 sets vs Fed heavily weigh in the Dick's favour if it comes down to games won/lost.

Currently it's...
RF 2-0 .667s .571g
AR 1-1 .500s .548g
IL 1-1 .500s .455g
DN 0-2 .333s .433g

So, let's say RF beats IL in two, to put Ivan out of the running. DN beats AR in three sets. The game diff would have to be +8 to Bandy to overturn Rodd - so it really would have to be something like 6-7 6-2 6-1 (if it was 6-7 6-3 6-1, AR would prevail by 0.01 of a percentage point!). That's if game %age takes precedence over head-to-head...

which would leave:

RF 3-0
DN 2-1
AR 2-1
IL 1-2

and if h2h is used to determine who goes through, we are safe and Roddick is OUT.

Federer v Nadal
Blake v Nalbandian

i kind of think Federer will have not too much trouble with Nadal. no idea who's going to win the other. Nalbandian is the only person I can actually envision beating Federer at all - and then only because I got burnt last year when I predicted he had no chance. Really, I think he has no chance.

I'm going to say Blake in a 3rd st t-b, while RF beats RN in two tight sets. RF beats JB in four on Sunday.

It'd be even more amusing if Nadal beats Federer, and Blake then beats Nadal (perfect record and all). From the start of this tournament I've thought there's a decent chance of that happening, though I still wouldn't bet money on it.

Something singularly unfortunate about the conjunction of "elevator", "galvanized", and "fight to the death" there...oh well.

the Nadal question is an interesting one now - I think paradoxically a) RF's worrying situation as of midway through this year was due to his own clay court supremacy (over the rest of the tour) and b) if the confidence he accrues from the past couple of wins over RN spills over into the clay season next year, then RN may have - in a way - shot himself in the foot by improving so much on fast surfaces.

if RF had played like eg Sampras did on clay, he would never have had such a negative head-to-head vs Nadal because he would never have gone deep enough into clay tournaments to even play him - 1-2 is a reasonably even one and no one would be talking about RN as a player who 'dominated' RF. (this is in part why the Sampras/Agassi rivalry seemed to tilt so far towards Sampras in terms of head-to-head: because Agassi was good enough on Sampras's territory to play him a number of times, and the reverse wasn't true.)

and if RN has remained a stereotypical clay-courter who didn't even bother to try to master other surfaces, he might still have that 6-1 head-to-head dominance over RF now - meaning that he'd have retained the mental advantage heading into the 2007 clay season, a mental advantage which has surely been lost now.

Just saw a few rallies from both the final and the Nadal semi on Sky Sports News - just breathtaking. Roger seemed really pumped up in the semi, which basically came down to a couple of points at the end of each set. RF's margin of victory over Blake not dissimilar to how he destroyed Agassi in '03 or indeed the way McEnroe put Lendl to the sword in the Masters a couple of times in the mid-'80s.

Must be a satisfying way to end the year (though Blake was hardly Federer's main rival this year) - to put all the stats to one side just for a second and actually demonstrate how much better you are than anyone else. In Mac's case in '83 (Jan '84) he was making a point that wasn't actually upheld by the previous 12 months' results (that year-end event at Madison Square Garden was a genuine play-off for the title of world champion - Wilander, Lendl, Connors and [maybe] Noah had claims too), but foreshadowed his dominance the next year.

Blake back in the top five now?

ATP top 30, 2005 end-of-year ranks in brackets...

1. Roger Federer (1)
2. Rafael Nadal (2)
3. Nikolay Davydenko (5)
4. James Blake (23)
5. Ivan Ljubicic (9)
6. Andy Roddick (3)
7. Tommy Robredo (19)
8. David Nalbandian (6)
9. Mario Ancic (21)
10. Fernando Gonzalez (11)
11. Tommy Haas (45)
12. Marcos Baghdatis (55)
13. Tomas Berdych (24)
14. David Ferrer (14)
15. Jarkko Nieminen (28)
16. Novak Djokovic (78)
17. Andy Murray (64)
18. Richard Gasquet (16)
19. Radek Stepanek (20)
20. Lleyton Hewitt (4)
21. Dominik Hrbaty (18)
22. Dmitry Tursunov (60)
23. Juan Carlos Ferrero (17)
24. Mikhail Youzhny (43)
25. Robin Soderling (77)
26. Marat Safin (12)
27. Jose Acasuso (40)
28. Sebastien Grosjean (25)
29. Agustin Calleri (51)
30. Stanislas Wawrinka (54)

am already experiencing tennis withdrawal symptoms. time to turn my attention to the CHALLENGERS i think, there is a large women's one in Poitiers next week where the top 2 seeds are um Aravane Rezai and Yuliana Fedak.