Federer is ever the optimist. At least, that’s how he portrays himself in interviews. He feels, with a little more work, he can beat anyone. This, despite the fact that Andy Murray has beaten Federer the last two times they played.
Murray beat the Swiss maestro in Toronto using a new-found aggressive play. He beat him in Shanghai asw well. In both cases, Murray played aggressive tennis and his serve made him tough to break.
But, credit this to Roger. When his game is flowing, he can make even the best look awful. And he made Murray look rather pedestrian.
Andy Murray didn’t help his case much. For a while, he was serving under 30%.
And that’s a huge problem because what is Murray’s one glaring weakness? His second serve.
Because Murray was serving so poorly, Roger Federer had repeated looks at the Murray second serve. And, for once, Roger’s strokes looked good–very good. None of that shanking business, or at least, not a flurry of ill-timed shots.
Federer was starting to catch Murray late on shots. His backhand appears to have more authority, the kind of authority that helped him win the first Slam of the year. He made frequent forays to the net, and nary lost a point when he reached the net, where many players try to go, and only end up empty-handed.
With Federer at net and sometimes Murray at near net, there was a series of nifty shots as the duo played cat and mouse at the net. At times, when one watches the maestro, it’s easy to forget, in his effortless movement from the baseline, that the Swiss is quite an athlete. He has among the best, if not the best, overhead in the game, especially his backhand overhead and leaps to reach lobs that seem a bit too far.
It didn’t help that Murray’s game seemed all out of sorts. He frequently hit his backhand wide. He’d be caught going the wrong direction. He lacked success at net. Much of that was Federer, robbing the young Scot of time. But clearly, some of it was Murray not being in tune with his game.
Murray lost to Federer last year, but he took a set off Fed. This time, he made too many errors, didn’t put in enough first serves, while Federer looked more confident and at ease with his game than he has in ages.
Federer took a double break in the second set, and try as Murray might, he could not even get a single break back.
Final score: 6-4, 6-2.
With this, Federer takes a 2-0 lead in Group B. He has only Robin Soderling left to play and he already has a gaudy record over Soderling. Whoever loses the Soderling-Ferrer match is out. That person will be 0-2 while the winner will be 1-1. Say, Ferrer wins. He’d be 1-1 and play Murray. The winner of that would be 2-1. Even if Soderling beat Federer, Soderling would be 1-2, and the 2-1 winner of Ferrer-Murray would go into the semis with Federer at 2-1.
If Soderling wins, he’ll be 1-1, Ferrer would be 0-2. In that case, it’s possible that Soderling beats Federer and Murray beats Ferrer and all 3 are 2-1. In that case, there’s a slim possibility Federer doesn’t make it. But he’d have to lose in straight sets and both Soderling and Murray would have to beat Ferrer in straight sets and lose very few games in the process.
If form holds, however, Federer should finish 3-0 in his group, with Murray or Ferrer the likely guy to join Federer. Murray will want to beat Ferrer quickly, but Ferrer has given him trouble on clay.
Djokovic leads Group A with his clean win over Berdych. Nadal had a lot of work to get by Roddick, but will probably improve. Tomorrow, Berdych plays Roddick. Roddick beat him in the finals of Miami, and unless Berdych can get out of his funk or Roddick has not recovered from his loss, I expect Roddick to move onward.
The feature match of the day is Nadal vs. Djokovic. Djokovic should be favored with Nadal looking a bit rusty, but I think this may be the most entertaining match. Last year, Djokovic beat Nadal in straight sets, but the last time these two met, Nadal won the finals of the US Open.
More top flight tennis to come!