The year-end championship has gone through a lot of changes over the years. Initially, it was a round-robin event, but back in 1981, there was some gamesmanship by Ivan Lendl. Bjorn Borg had won enough in his group to qualify for the semifinals, so he took some strategic losses. This left the unheralded Gene Mayer
Roger Federer may be the old man of tennis, but he's still breaking records. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga wasn't the player he expected to play in the finals. Perhaps it should have been Rafael Nadal or Andy Murray or Novak Djokovic. But Nadal was affected by a stomach bug, and just lacked his usual intensity. Andy Murray
Tomas Berdych is a rhythm player. If his timing is on, he can be one of the purest hitters in the game. But because he hits a pretty flat ball and needs to hit aggressive due to his lack of real footspeed, Tsonga, by contrast, has good footspeed, a good first serve, and a huge
During the Asian swing, Andy Murray made a bold proclamation. He said he wanted to finish the year as the world number 3. Some would say that's a wimpy statement. However, Djokovic had paced the field with 3 Slam wins and 5 Masters 1000. It was out of the question for Murray to accumulate enough
Out of the 12 matches played in the round robin matches, six were upsets, which is a fair bit considering who they were. In particular, All three matches David Ferrer played were upsets. Murray and Djokovic were favored to win over Ferrer, though in hindsight, neither Murray nor Djokovic were 100%. Ferrer was expected to
Due to the round robin format and the various wins and losses, Djokovic needed help to get into the semifinals. In particular, the straight set loss to Ferrer meant Djokovic needs help from Ferrer to get to the semifinals. Basically, if Djokovic won in straight sets, he could get in, provided Ferrer won at least
Who knew? Roger Federer was right, after all. Before the tournament, he said that any of the top eight players had a chance to win the title. No one took this seriously. After all, only the top four players had won every Masters 1000 title. Fish was perhaps injured. Ferrer had lost all 3 round
In 2007, David Ferrer burst on the scene at the year-end championship. Then, it was held in Shanghai and still called the Tennis Masters Cup. Ferrer went undefeated in round robin play as the 6th seed beating Nadal, Djokovic, and Gasquet. He crushed Roddick in the semifinals, but lost rather tamely to Federer in the
This is one of the rare situations where a top-ten player, like Tomas Berdych, might have preferred to play an in-form Murray rather than Janko Tipsarevic. Until Paris, Berdych had never beaten Tipsarevic in four tries. Even the meeting at Paris, which had huge implications for everyone on the bubble of getting into London (Tsonga,
It was unclear, heading into London how Nadal was going to fare. Much like last year, Nadal had a somewhat indifferent fall losing to Murray in the final of Tokyo and to Mayer in Shanghai. Nadal opted, for the second year in a row, to not play Paris and prep for the year-end championship by
