I know its not a major tournament, but the big names still all showed up and there's still some high quality tennis going on. The big news, however, is that Federer followed up his loss in the Wimbledon finals with an absolute chokejob in the 2nd round of this tournament. He lost to the 22nd ranked Gilles Simon of France yesterday (Link). Djokovic and Nadal both advanced and looked good (although Nadal said he wasn't happy with his performance yesterday), so I'm hoping for them to meet in the Finals. On another note, I'm attending a match this evening. It'll be the first tennis match I've attended and if I'm reading the schedule properly, I'll be watching Nadal face off against Andreev. Pretty excited about it.
So it was a pretty entertaining night. There was a bit of a rain delay so when we arrived, we got to see the last half of the final set between Blake and Tursunov (Blake beat him). Then we walked around, watched a little bit of Federer's doubles match (it was hard to get a great view because of the huge crowd) and then moved on to see Kiefer upset Davydenko. There were actually quite a few upsets yesterday. Roddick and Ferrer were also knocked out. The Nadal-Andreev match probably wasn't as good as it could've been because Igor rolled his ankle in the first game. He came back, but it took him most of the first set to warm up again (he got smoked, 6-2). The second set was really interesting though, and even though news reports will say it was a breeze for Nadal, I thought it was legitimately competitive. I think Nadal was fatigued from having played two days in a row. It went back and forth, with Andreev taking the lead until Rafa would tie it back up again. Igor would smoke through it whenever he got the serve and I thought he he would take the set, but he got schooled when it went to the tiebreaker. The best-of-3 format leaves this tournament much more prone to upsets (probably one of the reasons Djokovic beat Federer last year), so I'm interested to see who makes it to the finals.
