(Zumapress)
Before today, David had yet to face a top 30 player in his comeback. The players that he faced were mostly easier to dominate, but even more so, easier to play aggressively against while compromising errors every now and then. I have noticed that since his comeback, David hasn’t really played much of what could be called solid tennis, and that seemed to cost him today, in his 6-4 6-1 loss to Jurgen Melzer. It’s not really his fault. He looked rusty to me, and he looked very rusty in that second set especially.
In the beginning of the match, there was nothing to suggest that the end of the match would disintegrate as quickly as it did. Actually it was a promising start from David. In the first five minutes anyway. He opened up his first service game with some good serving and seemed to carry on with a similar kind of dominance early in the first set. In Melzer’s first service game, David seemed to be returning well and hitting devastating groundstrokes. Not exactly in vintage fashion but he was hitting them so big that all the rallies seemed to be played in his favour, from a control point of view.
I remember being taken by surprise by that because Melzer isn’t exactly a defensive player himself. But maybe he hadn’t been getting to the ball early enough to do more with it, though I think what happened later in the match also suggested that he wasn’t fully confident yet.
This looked a bit like David in his overly aggressive state, trying to keep points short though. At the moment he’s still missing rhythm and timing in his shots, one of his trademarks and also one of the key components in tennis that pretty much determine how well a player is playing. I think when David is playing well, sometimes he has so much time in between shots that it’s like he has so much time to split step and kind of dance around his shots. Here, it seemed like only a matter of time that David would leak an error, if the rally was extended long enough. Melzer hadn’t really been doing much spectacular, but he showed some good defensive skills to hang in rallies long enough for them to turn in his favour. And he seemed to handle the pace well, and in fact seemed to enjoy it.
The key factor in the majority of the first set though was the serve and return. The first set was characterised by short rallies that were either set up by the serve or won directly from it. After a promising opening return game from David, he never looked like he had a chance on Melzer’s serve. Not even close. Only on rare occasions would David actually manage to hit the return in the court, though it must be said that part of this was due to Melzer’s lefty serve which seemed to swing far away from the court after the bounce.
(Zumapress)
I’m pretty sure that if Melzer’s serve didn’t have as much work on the ball, there is no way that David would have shanked so many backhand returns. Though you would have thought that after a while, David would have started to read and anticipate it better. The majority of Melzer’s serves were directed down the T on the deuce court and wide on the ad court, standard lefty serves, and also mostly directed to David’s backhand. Again, I guess this is a timing issue. At least Melzer didn’t seem to have much of a look on David’s serve either. So it was strange to not worry about David’s serve for a while, since it looked to be working well enough. Though I really don’t think Melzer should have stood so far behind the baseline to return it.
The first set was all very standard until the crucial game where Melzer broke serve. I think I noted one of Melzer’s winners in that 4-4 game as being one of his first aggressive shots on the match. I could have very well been right considering that he only ended up with three winners in the first set, and he also stepped into the court to unleash a backhand down-the-line to give himself a clear advantage. I don’t think David moved particularly well to his right, and actually all of his lunging around the court looked to be very heavy-footed.
Melzer definitely stepped up his game, and David was maybe taken by surprise by it. He went down four break points, and after so excitingly saving the first three, succumbed to the final one with a tame double fault. Though he did save one of the break points with a nice kick second serve to the ad court and backhand crosscourt winner, which I’d consider to be one of the most memorable points of the match, probably due to the circumstances.
There was nothing in that set to suggest that the next one would be as one-sided as it turned out, but I guess confidence and lack of confidence can play huge roles in matches, and it did so here for both players. I think somewhere along the way, David lost a bit of pace on his shots but it’s always hard for me to tell whether that’s intentional, in an attempt to regain consistency, considering that when he was in better form, he didn’t always choose to hit at full pace either. In fact, most of the time, he didn’t.
Melzer definitely picked up his pace though, now being more adventurous changing directions and hitting down the lines more. The first return game he played was easily his best of the match, as if much of the pressure had been relieved off his shoulders from winning that first set.
I started to notice David having more difficulty finishing off rallies though. Pretty much nothing was going in his favour. His timing continued to deteriorate as the match went on, hitting a very large amount of shanks for his standards. In the end, I think he had pretty much lost concentration and lost hope, which is what led to the tame ending. Nothing he tried really looked like he believed in it. He tried to hit his way out of trouble, but it was basically just a low percentage attempt. This is now the end of his Indian Wells campaign, and it was unfortunately a short-lived one.
The commentator I was listening to was right. At this stage of David’s comeback, it’s important for him to get as much match play as possible, and this includes the match clock. And unfortunately for him, he was out of this match in 1 hour and 4 minutes, and probably not in competitive mode even earlier than that. But I guess there is Miami coming up not too far away, though by then I won’t be the one here to report on that.
Match download
For anyone that was unable to watch the match, Andvari has kindly uploaded the match to Megaupload (Thanks again!).
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=MDOG4R4Y
15 comments:
great match report! thanks, vamos david!
Good match report, Krystle. You definitely described the match I saw. You should be writing as a tennis beat reporter for a newspaper. Any such assignments in Australia? Here in the U.S. there's hardly any tennis coverage. You have to get most of it on the Internet. The Miami Herald is an exception. Perhaps there are a few others, but I don't know of them. Thanks for your work.
great job indeed
Very good report!
Maybe is because the result, but from the start David didn't look with a lot of energy. A lot of time between points or serves. More than usual. Probably due to the heat.
As I said in another post, he needs to play more but he will have to face some problems that, IMO, are more related to needing time to adjust than anything related to train. For example, David said he was tired still from the DC and that in the second set he didn't have energy (he said the spam didn't affect him even if he still has some problems there). He's thinner than before the surgery, in better shape. David is a player that doesn't need a lot of time to adjust. IMO, it's not weird, in fact is something that I didn't think but is quiet obvious, it's been almost a year he doesn't travel or has these changes so often. And in less than ten days he went to the DC tie and in 72 hours he played two matches (5 sets), then he went to USA, he went driving to IW and then played. For a player with the normal rythm that would be ok or could cause a little problem... but he didn't do this since May 09. And all his matches were in Argentina.
So, even if we're talking about the guy who went a day before to Estoril and won it, not to mention the MC in Shangai... now he's out of this completely.
And this is another thing he has to get back, not only the rythm of playing but the traveling thing too. And here there's no trainning to help.
Besides that, he has to regulate better on court: he starts great and then slow down.
But all in all? And the way Melzer was playing? the first set showed David on a great level. He daved some set points in a very good way.
So, considering the whole picture it wasn't that bad. He needs time not only on court. He has to "recover" a lot of things. The tennis is there and is a huuuuuuge start. I remember some trainnings or matches from players with less time out of the circuit and David is intact in certain things. But he's human, not matter the talent.
And, like I said before, it's not like "normal" David didn't play like this in the past ;).
The first 3 or 4 months will be like this. His team said it.
John, I don't think there is much room for tennis writing here in Australia. I am not even sure if the people that write about tennis for newspapers exclusively comment on tennis. I think they probably write about other sports too. I guess with the internet these days, there are more possibilities of something coming up based from another country. But probably not much possibility for me because I don't enquire about it anymore. Though I used to when I was more of a newbie to writing about tennis.
Well, David was not as pumped up as he was in Buenos Aires or Davis Cup. But in a tournament like Indian Wells, he has played with a similar lack of energy plenty of times before. I'm not really sure if his poor movement was down to that anyway. It seemed poor in a way that was kind of expected.
Yeah he did give up in the second set. Surely part of it was due to a lack of confidence. How can you feel good about your groundstrokes when so many shots are not even close to hitting the centre of the racquet? (Personally I really hate days like these myself when I play tennis. It's downright depressing.) Especially since David's not really a player that generally shanks a lot, so it's not a good sign for him.
On the topic of Melzer's performance from yesterday, I personally don't really think Melzer played that well in the first set, aside from the final game. It was about average, or maybe slightly above average. He played so much better in the second set. David being able to handle long rallies better, would have done better. Though the important part for him was that he served well, and he dealt with David's pace well. It was pretty obvious that his movement was better than David's in this match.
Watching this match, I started to realize that Melzer is one of those players that you don't really know what to expect from each match, in that he can come out and play different styles. Sometimes he can come out and serve-and-volley almost every point, even if it's on clay, while yesterday he barely sneaked in at all. Whereas with David, you more or less know what to expect even though it's not like he plays the same way each match.
Melzer gets a walkover to the 4th round - Greul has withdrawn, ill.
I don't want to be mean... but one of the QF matches of Indian Wells is Ljubicic - Monaco? I think this describes how the tournament was. Not to mention that for the third round you had a hell of a match in Federer-Bagdathis and on the other side you had García Lopez- Monaco. Nothing personal with Pico but he's not exactly a MS final rounds material...
Anna, as long as Pico is standing, he has a chance. The H2H between these two is 1-1, so each has an equal chance of winning this match.
Yeah, but it's not about the chances .. but the tournament itself. The level of this year. Even when a lot of players went out early because they played like crap (not because the rival had some merit in the result), the names you can see in several matches are not the ones you could expect at the 3th or 4th round of IW, the so called 5th Slam. And the worst? It's not that they're playing the tennis of their life, they're "surprises"... no, the level of certain matches was mediocre. You have one player (Troicki) who won because in his two matches the rival couldn't play, today the match Monaco-garcia Lopez was really poor for that instance and, in general, not exactly the quality of players you want to see in that instance. for whatever reason, the names and quality are far from the best this year.
There are matches that you want to say "please end" just for mercy. It's not that all the "surprises" came from matches like Federer-Bagdathis. No, a lot of them came from injuries or horrible days from the seeded players.
couldn't agree more, for i like IW more than wimbledon itself, but this year it was a mess for sure.
Djokovic playing like the Absolute Shit(maybe not feeling well, but dats his problem, and surely doesnt deserve 2 be a num 2)Federer played only a horrible 3rd set(extremely poor BHs), the only interesting match was to be murray vs Almagro (he retired),Nadal vs Isner (how on earth its gonna be a good match), Ljubicic vs monaco(wont even go into that)now 1 match remains interesting , nadal vs Berdych (since they hate eachother, and Tomas is playing well, hopefully wont give him a W.O)...am already startin to think about miami
I agree, Anna and Noubar, a very crazy tournament indeed. In the case of Cilic and Djokovic, and to some degree David, I think the DC played a part in their tired exits. All three were the heroes for their countries and I think it took a toll. Of course David had a lack of match play, too. But the walkovers, retirements and poor performances? Weird. Hope Berdych v Nadal and Murray v Soderling are good matches.
very good points john, cant wait for rafa berdych
One thing that I didn't read here.
David got a WC for Godó. There are two WC confirmed: Moyá and him.
Well, I obviously was emotionally involved in Soda's deep run, so the tournament wasn't a wash out for me until the last day. lol But Ljubicic winning it? Wow! That is almost hard to believe. I wonder if he can duplicate those kinds of results for the rest of the year. Neither Soda nor Roddick played particularly well in the SFs, but Soda had a "defining" match against Murray I thought. He was playing at his highest level against Tsonga and Murray and it was fun to watch. :)
I was anticipating another Soda/Rafa match in the Final, but those two seem to have a habit of choking when they are within one official match of playing each other since the French Open last year (See Shanghai and Paris last year, for example). The WTFs kind of forced them to play each other and the emotions do run high with those too, as used to be the case with Tomas and Rafa too (good match! Poor Tomas!! He must feel like he gets no luck playing so well until someone challenges him and then almost always losing when he gets in a tight match....that rout of Verdasco...he can be amazing sometimes!) although they were very friendly at the Abu Dhabi exho.
Glad Miami is here. I think Roddick had a very tough win against Melzer, and Melzer played very well. Also, it cannot be underestimated how big it is for Andy to have the home field advantage in so many of these tournaments, as the crowd almost will him to victory too. Melzer played just fine and will be a threat in Miami. Nalby wasn't as lucky as I had thought with that draw. I think he will do better in Miami because he will be rested and rejuvenated, but hope Melzer is in some other section. lol
Excellent analysis and writing as always, Krystle. Word of mouth will keep spreading on your talents. It is obvious you are gifted. :)
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