Milos Raonic is doing the best of the “new 4″ which is Raonic, Tomic, Dimitrov, and Harrison.  Raonic has done the best of the four having won a tournament (San Jose) and been runner up at another (Memphis).  Raonic’s big weapon is his huge serve.  This wins him a lot of free points.  His weakness is his rawness.  He goes after big shots, but they still land out.  These are the kinds of problems Courier and Agassi used to have.  They would hit hard when things got desperate and the balls would go in or they wouldn’t, but it didn’t matter much.  Both matured when they learned to rein in their aggressiveness.

But where Raonic, in my mind, really suffers is footspeed and perhaps return of serve.  Benneteau is a crafty French veteran.  He serves reasonably big.  He moves reasonably fast.  He’s had pretty good volleys due to the doubles.  He’s the kind of guy Raonic should, in principle, beat.  But everytime Benneteau would drop shot, and often not that well, Raonic would lumber up to the net, struggling to reach it.  Or if he was at net, Benneteau would lob and Raonic would lumber back.

Indeed, of all the folks near Raonic’s height, which is about 6’5”, which includes Berdych, Querrey, Cilic, del Potro, he seems the slowest by quite a bit.

Although Benneteau struggled returning Raonic’s serve, Raonic struggled just as much with Benneteau’s serve.  If there are two keys to being at the very top of the game, it’s footspeed and return of serve, something Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray all excel.

As one might expect, the match mostly went to tiebreaks with Raonic taking the first, Benneteau taking the second.  There were no breaks in the first two sets.  Benneteau secured the only break after pushing Raonic to 0-40.  Raonic earned two points back but couldn’t secure the third.  It was only a matter of time for Benneteau to serve it out.

Other scores

  • Garcia-Lopez d Giraldo 64 16 64
  • Kohlschreiber d Youzhny 64 62
  • Mayer d Stepanek 75 63
  • Anderson d Muller 63 46 64
  • Verdasco d Cilic 36 62 63
  • Benneteau d Raonic 67 76 64

In an odd turn of events, Alex Bogomolov wanted to retire from his match against Bellucci even though he lacked a good reason to do so (he wasn’t injured).  Bellucci had taken the first set 64.  If Bogomolov is trying to tank, he’s doing a bad job.  He’s held serve pretty easily most serves and Bellucci has held serve easily too.  If anything, Bellucci has been a bit loose.  Bogomolov doesn’t seem to be able to give games away, if he’s even attempting it.  So who knows?  Maybe Bogomolov will try to win it after all.

Andy Murray is playing doubles with Ross Hutchins who normally teams with Colin Fleming.  This suggests Murray is fine and can play singles.  They have split sets with Almagro and Merrero so they will play a 10 point champions tiebreak to decide the winner.  Currently, Murray and Hutchins are up 6-2 in the tiebreak.

EDIT: Murray/Hutchins won the champions tiebreak 10-7.  Bogomolov won the second set tiebreak.  Must have decided to play the match after all.