We’re down to two more tournaments.  This week starts the BNP Paribas Masters which is also known as the Paris Indoors.  It’s the last of the 9 Masters 1000 events.  All the top pros are expected to play minus Rafael Nadal who said a shoulder injury was bothering him and he wanted to rest for the ATP World Tour Finals.

This makes Roger Federer the top seed.  Fresh off his two wins at Stockholm and Basel, this is as much as Federer generally plays.  He’ll be at his third tournament in a row before everyone gets a week off and the top 8 vie for the year end champion.us

Actually, there’s still one more event after that.  As usual, players complain about the Davis Cup schedule.  After the ATP World Tour Finals, the Davis Cup finals is played which pits Serbia against France.  France will do without Jo-Wilfried Tsonga who was recently injured again.  Serbia faces some good timing as Victor Troicki is playing some of his best tennis ever, and since his ranking is low enough, he’ll be fresh for Davis Cup (he won’t qualify for the ATP World Tour Finals).

Where’s everyone’s form?  Rafa is injured.  The post-US Open has always been a trouble spot for Rafa.  This year was as good as any for him, but so many more players can give Rafa trouble on a hard court, and they did again this year.  Rafa won Tokyo, but just barely, mostly due to a choke by Troicki who had match points, but couldn’t string together a good point before getting broken and losing in a close tiebreak.  Rafa is the ultimate test in tennis.  You know what you must do against him, and so you do it.

Roger Federer is playing solid, if not spectacular tennis.  He still beats the players he should, and then he holds his own against the rest.  This isn’t the Roger that used to play such flawless tennis that makes your mouth drop, but he still does it often enough, avoids too many errors on his own game, and gets cooperation from his opponents who also make mistakes, that he does well enough.  After a not so great year which he blamed back and leg problems, Roger is at least playing somewhat cleaner tennis.  He still occasionally shanks a ball, something that hasn’t been seen since Bjorn Borg was in his heyday (I mean, honestly, what other top pro mishits the ball that badly that often?  No one really).

Novak Djokovic is playing pretty well.  He didn’t play consistently well in his loss to Roger Federer.  In the second set, he got the shots in he needed to, but a choke double-fault, possibly induced by a zealous Swiss fan that called “Game, Federer” at break point down revealed a bit of mental frailty as well as partisan Swiss resolve.  Who said the Swiss were neutral when it comes to one of their own?  Even so, results-wise, Djokovic is playing about as well as anyone not named Roger Federer.

Andy Murray has been more up-and-down.  Murray claimed his focus this year was different.  He was aiming for the Slams.  One wonders if he’s merely doggedly following this mantra, thus not caring about anything except Masters 1000 events and above and showing less than 100% at anything else, or whether it’s just Andy being Andy.  Murray shows a rather incredible ability to adapt his game to play winning tennis, yet he also shows that sometimes, he’s not fully mentally there all the time.  It’s the same complaint with Djokovic, but often, Djokovic’s woes can be traced to health issues.  With the weather cool or at least controlled indoors, Djokovic has not had the same issues as he had earlier in the year outdoors with potential allergens to upset the moody Serb.

Still, Murray followed up a loss in Beijing to Ivan Ljubicic with a win over Roger Federer in Shanghai, partly aided by a friendly draw where he didn’t meet anyone close to tough until the semifinals.  Can he do the same in Paris?  Does he want to?

Two of last year’s breakout stars were gone for much of the year.  This was Juan Martin del Potro who only played the Australian Open, then was gone until Bangkok, proceeded to lose two first rounders, and decided to take the rest of the year off.

The other was Nikolay Davydenko.  He dropped out of Indian Wells after the first round, and didn’t return until shortly after the French Open.  He hasn’t been the same player since, losing early in pretty much every tournament since then.  He admitted this year was a wash, and he would regroup for next year.

Robin Soderling continued to play good tennis.  For a player just outside the highest ranks, he consistently does well in any tournament because he hits such huge shots.  But if you can find a way to neutralize him, he has few answers.  Even so, he’s been solidly entrenched in the top ten, which is a huge leap for someone that was thought of as weak mentally.  Unlike the other top pros, he struggles to get to finals, but he’s often good to quarters or semis, which keeps his rank up.

Andy Roddick is still doing enough to keep himself in top ten.  His best tennis was right at Indian Wells and Miami.  After that, he missed the entire clay season, than had a poor Wimbledon by his standards, losing to a player he shouldn’t have (partly due to some injury, it seems).  Roddick does what he does best.  He plugs away.  Still, it doesn’t help his efforts when he loses to fellow Americans like Isner, Querrey, and Fish.  Speaking of which, except for an early good showing by Isner, none of the three have done well in recent weeks.  I think Fish is hurt, so he hasn’t played in quite a while.

Fernando Verdasco seemed on the verge of having a great summer and pulled a classic bonehead move.  He played way too much.  Rafa was at pains to skip Barcelona this year.  Normally, he plays four clay events leading up to the French, but he generally wins all of them too (or does very well).  Not only did Verdasco play all these events, he also played Nice.  He fizzled against Almagro and hasn’t been the same player since.  Normally, Verdasco is a solid hard court player, but he’s played poorly since the French, and that, my friends, is half the tennis year.  Verdasco may be a nice guy that advertises underwear, but he’s never been known as a tennis genius.  Next year, he needs to control how much he plays.

The average tennis fan only cares about the top 3-4 players.  The rest don’t seem to matter.  Yet, this year, as much as any other, has been a great year for David Ferrer.  OK, so he’s not ready to beat the top 4, but he doggedly makes himself relevant.  This year, he played the clay circuit that runs through South and Central America and split titles with buddy, Juan Carlos Ferrero.  But where Ferrero faded to obscurity the rest of the year, Ferrer continued to play good, solid clay court tennis leading up to the French.  OK, he was upset a bit earlier than expected, but he comes back post-US Open to win his home tournament in Valencia over fellow Spaniard, Marcel Granollers.  Ferrer uses his speed as well as anyone.  He lacks big weapons.  He doesn’t have a particularly big serve, and you can overpower him if you don’t make too many errors yourself.  Thus, Nadal has a spectacular record against Ferrer, but Soderling tends to split matches with his steadier counterpart.

Overall, 2010 looks like a worse year for everyone except Rafael Nadal.  There were no breakout stars this year.  Ernests Gulbis appeared poised to do just that right near the French Open, then got injured in the French and returned back to his losing ways.  Thiemo de Bakker rose from nowhere, but honestly, he’s just in a higher class of nowhere now.

Roger Federer lost before the semis twice in a Slam for the first time in what feels like forever.  Andy Murray didn’t win his first tournament of the year until Toronto, and he had won some half a dozen last year.  Novak Djokovic had a much better 2009 than 2010 other than an appearance in his third Slam final at the US Open, courtesy of some gutsy hitting at the end of the fifth set against Rog (and for the third year in a row, the US Open final was played on a Monday).

Roger started off with a bang winning the Aussie Open (he claims, any year he wins a Slam is a good year), but his superior play at Melbourne soon faded to the kind of play we see now from Roger, sporadically brilliant, but error-prone.  Pretty much the Roger since 2008.  He claims he’s doing better, but it’s no longer the same as 2005, when he could hit 20 brilliant shots in a row, if need be.  These days, ten shots and Roger is ready to hit an improbable winner that often leads to a probable error.  Even so, his play markedly improved after Wimbledon, given how problematic it was for the few months up to then.

Of course, neither Nikolay Davydenko nor Juan Martin del Potro had a good year.  Indeed, del Potro played only 3 tournaments all year, and it seemed Davydenko did too.  He might have physically been at other tournaments, but he threatened to not play reverse singles against Argentina in a crucial Davis Cup tie, only to have his wife chastise him for quitting.  Loathe to disappoint his significant other, Nikolay came back and won his reverse singles.  Alas, Youzhny was not enough to defeat Nalbandian, who had hoped to single-handedly win the Davis Cup for Argentina (didn’t happen, though).

As 2010 fades, one can only hope the top pros play good tennis.  This was a year only Rafa could love.  He pulled off the rare triple, winning his first US Open, his second Wimbledon, and yet another French.  The rest of the players, alas, need to step it up in 2011.