It’s been a long time since the French have won the French Open.  The peculiar part is that most French players play better on fast courts than on clay.  It’s not that their incompetent on clay, far from it.  Perhaps one day they’ll do something that would be almost heretical in modern tennis: changing the French Open to a different surface.

The Asian swing of the tour starts next week in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur.  This week concludes two tournaments in Europe, one on clay and one indoors.

Metz (also called the Moselle Open) is a tournament that has been won primarily by the French.  Two years ago, Gael Monfils won the tournament.  Last year, it was Gilles Simon.  This year, Tsonga was the favorite to win.  Despite his shellacking in the Davis Cup by Nadal, he was in form today against, Ivan Ljubicic who, by the way, won this event in 2005, and shows that, despite being older than 30, he can still play tennis.

Alas, he picked a bad day.  Ljubicic has a big serve, a big forehand, a nice backhand, and a decent net game.  What he lacks is a bit of footspeed, and enough accuracy mixed with pace to keep him in points against Tsonga.  Ljubicic had been relying on his big serve to win matches leading up to the finals.  When you can lean on a big serve, it makes winning that much easier.  But Tsonga kept getting balls back in play and Tsonga has one of the best forehand in the world.

With all that pace, Ljubicic was often left struggling to get the ball back somewhere in the court that wouldn’t hurt him.  Alas, there aren’t many places to do that.  Tsonga took the first set rather handily, 6-3.  In the second set, Ljubicic managed to keep things pretty even and forced it to a tiebreak where he took a chance and attacked a return and got ahead in the tiebreak, eventually claiming it 7 points to 4.  However, Tsonga was back to his dominating ways in the third set with an early break and took the third set, 6-3, which included two breaks of Ljubicic’s serve including the final game of the match.

Tsonga is now in 8th place for the last spot in the ATP World Tour Finals.  Four players have clinched spots: Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Murray with the other four still in play.

In Bucharest, Romania, Florian Mayer finally got the monkey off his back winning his first ATP tour title in five tries.  He beat Pablo Andujar in a little over an hour, 6-3, 6-1.  The tournament is named after Ion Tiriac and Ilie Nastase, two famous Romanian players who did the bulk of their playing in the 1970s.

Meanwhile Jamie Murray (Andy’s brother) teamed up with Andre Sa (of Brazil) to win the doubles title in Moselle.

Next week (that is tomorrow), the tour heads to Asia.  There are two tournaments being played there.  Bangkok sports the bigger names including Andy Murray, Gael Monfils, and Gilles Simon.  Murray was grumbling about playing Bangkok mostly because he wasn’t feeling 100%.  He alluded to the guarantee money as a prime motivator to make this trip.  Murray hasn’t played here since 2006.  Gilles Simon won the title in 2009.

The other tournament is Kuala Lumpur.  Almagro, Troicki, and Tipsarevic lead the field in this Malaysian tournament.

Roger Federer said he planned to skip Shanghai, the penultimate Masters 1000 title, scheduled to be played in two weeks due to nagging injuries.  It’s likely Nadal and Djokovic (especially, Djokovic) might skip it too.  Federer said he would aim to return in Basel.