Of course, the very day I only highlight one match to watch, Day 6 turned into a day of exciting upsets only the clairvoyant could see coming.
Upsets From The Left
Six left-handed players contested singles matches on Day 6. Ekaterina Makarova from Russia; the Czech trio of Iveta Benesova, Petra Kvitova, Lucie Safarova; the Austrian Jurgen Melzer and of course Rafael Nadal of Spain.
No. 2 seed Vera Zvonareva was able to fend off an upset from Safarova in three sets, while both lefty men, despite being pushed against the wall for at least a set, pushed through.
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Perhaps the biggest surprise was the three-set victory of Benesova over No. 16 seed Anastasia Pavyluchenkova. The 19-year-old Russian was the Brisbane runner up who'd never lost more than a few games to Benesova in their previous two meetings. But the 60th-ranked veteran destroyed her first two opponents to the loss of only five games. So when she took the first set routinely, it was clear she had come to play. Nastya fought back to take the second, but the lefty slice-served her way to a 7-5 victory.
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49th-ranked Makarova, who also dismissed No. 19 seed Ana Ivanovic 10-8 in the third in the first round, had beaten No. 13 seed Nadia Petrova the last two times they played. Her 8-6 in the third upset of the talented but mentally frail and heavily frilled Russian wasn't exactly a surprise. After the match, Makarova accused her compatriot of all kinds of gamesmanship. Must've made for an interesting locker room scene.
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Petra turned in the best and most fearless performance of the event so far on the women's side in dispatching No. 5 seed Samantha Stosur in straight sets. The 20-year-old No. 25 seed took the crowd out of the match early. With unreturnable serves, heavy ground strokes, deft touch, deceptively efficient court coverage, she went up 3-1. But her first serve deserted her and Sam made the first set a dogfight that ended in a 12-point tiebreak. Steve Tignor pointed out one of the things that makes Petra special.
Kvitova had come from behind to snag a 6-5 lead in the first-set tiebreaker. She got a second serve to her forehand in the ad court. I was sitting right down that line behind her, and I thought she would try to crack it straight ahead for an outright winner. It was tempting, it was open, and it’s what most top women players would have done. Instead, Kvitova swung her return into the middle of the court, without being tentative about it, and made the obviously quaking Stosur play. Kvitova won the point and the set.
What impresses me most about Petra is her composure under pressure. Facing three break points at 2-2 in the second set, she played three of the bravest points of the match. And she looked as though she enjoyed every moment of it. The woman who looks like a young Bette Davis with smaller eyes struck 35 winners total, 16 in the second set. Sam Stosur hit 11 winners, ZERO in the second set. Sam tried to slice, kick, spin, and shuffle, but Petra had an answer for everything. Simply stunning.
Upsets From The Youth
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I didn't get to watch most of the tussle between No. 13 seed Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and 46th-ranked Alexandr Dolgopolov, but the 22-year-old man from the Ukraine with the androgynous face, frizzy hair, and stringy pony-tail, making his Australian Open debut, whipped the former finalist into submission taking the affair 6-1 in the fifth. Raise your hand if you saw that coming? Tsonga needs to get fit. Period.
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The story of the event belongs to 20-year-old Canadian qualifier Milos Raonic ranked No. 152 in the world. I return you to Tignor:
So it was with some surprise—and some surprise at my surprise—that I saw the spirit of Sampras rise again this afternoon in the blandest of places, Melbourne Park's Show Court 3, and in seemingly the most anonymous of players, 152nd-ranked Milos Raonic. A native of Montenegro (his uncle is the vice-president) who has lived most of his life in Canada, Raonic spent his youth poring over tapes of Sampras matches and building a game that was similarly based around a monster serve—“I’ve got a good shoulder on me,” Raonic says. You could see that his serve, which Raonic believes is already among the game’s best (he’s really not that cocky), allowed him to take a Sampras-like approach to his match with No. 10 seed Mikhail Youzhny.
“I feel like I serve like probably one of the top guys on the tour," he said. "It allows me to play more freely also on the return games, because I know most of the time I will be holding. So it allows me to take less pressure on myself, whereas I feel it also puts more pressure on the other guy.” (Confident, yes, Raonic does seem to be that—call it the civilized version of cocky.)
Even when Raonic was broken in the second and third sets, which he was more regularly than he might have expected, he played borderline-risky, opportunistic tennis on Youzhny’s serve. Raonic prefers to rip rather than rally on his forehand, and he loves to go for an outright crosscourt winner on his return from that side. He also put two backhands smack on the sideline to break Youzhny early in the third set.
But as big as he tries to hit, Raonic says he has a plan. When one reporter implied that he was enjoying the youthful freedom to crack the ball with total abandon, Raonic quietly protested. “I was trying to do what I thought was the percentage play," he said, "or if I felt I had an opportunity to try something riskier. But I wouldn’t say I was really just letting the ball fly off my racquet, not knowing where it’s going.” Indeed, Raonic doesn’t just bash to bash or rally to rally. He hits with purpose and aggression, and has to accept the errors that come with that aggression.
Read the whole piece for the whole story on the hunch-shouldered ball of dynamite from the North.
After his upset, ESPN conducted a studio interview. This young man analyzes his game and his opponents with the insight of the best commentator. He told us exactly what he'll do to beat David Ferrer in the next round. But perhaps his best weapon of all is his self-confidence. "I believe in myself," he told a drooling Patrick McEnroe and Darren Cahill.
You can have all the talent in the world but without belief, it means nothing.
