Monday, April 11, 2011

Pablo Andujar wins first title in Casablanca and his football team win 5-0

Andujar wins Casablanca

Pablo Andujar with Casablanca title

The spring clay season kicked off with a couple of surprising title winners in Casablanca and Houston. While Andujar had the capabilities of winning a small clay title, the fact that the Bahamian Ryan Sweeting won Houston is bemusing at best, besides his immediate family and friends no one thought he’d win. It shows Houston has some special characteristics. In addition that if Sweeting can win an ATP title, it should be inspiration to other players.

Casachallenger was quite entertaining this year. Had some good weather which made the courts play fairly quickly. There is only so much clay one can lay down, water, sweeping in either direction before Mother Nature takes its course. Since the readers of this blog are educated, there was very little point to this paragraph.

Before moving to Andujar. There was a brilliant choke in the 2nd round in the match between Blaž Kavčič and Fabio “the Fog” Fognini. This probably should have had a separate entry and it may do so in the future. It’s hard to write about this as Kavčič is someone who I happen to like and “the Fog” is just the “the Fog”. He’d be top 10 in the world if it was down to strutting ability.

Kavčič takes the 1st set 6-1 and the only game Fog got was because he broke the Kavčič serve. Second set is going along the same path, a few breaks and Kavčič is up *5-2 has a chance to serve the match out, fails to do it at the first time of asking. Then in the Fog’s next service game he had 4 match points couldn’t convert any. After this Blaž loses the next 4 games and set 7-5.

Third set was a breakathon and Blaž had another chance to serve it out at *5-4, loses his serve and then drops the 12th game to love and the Fog sneaks out another win. It’s annoying yet hilarious at the same time on a personal level. This should have been livestreamed just for the entertainment value alone, at the same time as a Blaž fan watching this on a computer could have done bad things to my health and sanity. It doesn’t help I had a small wager on him before the match at good odds. Choking to the Fog isn’t nice and it’s the second time this player cost me financially.

All players have choked matches away at some point, but it’s how they recover from it. Voinea has done great work with Blaž so far and it’s been a problem for Blaž too many times he gets defensive and tight, where he is just pushing the ball instead of hitting it. Naturally when the arm is tighter the racquet head isn’t going to accelerate as quickly through the ball, hence the fodder and short stuff that can be exploited.

Señor Andujar started the week by taking out Florent “que sera” Serra he dropped a set, which is more due to a lack of concentration, once he got that back it was 6-2 in the 3rd. After that he played the captain of the French baseball team Jeremy Chardy who makes PHM look like Einstein, believes in the close your eyes and hit as hard you can theory. Too solid for Chardy and “Arriba” Pere Riba in the quarter finals.

Andujar lifted his game for the semi against Montañes. He was placing the serve well, using excellent angles on the forehand especially pushing Montañes further back and finish many points at the net with good volleys. It shows that volleying can be effective on any court surface.

The best was yet to come for Andujar in the final, it was his second final after Bucharest last year where he was so tired and offered token resistence to Chela. This time around he was fresher and his opponent Starace who was favourite for the final had a brutal match with Hanescu in the semi. Starace had chances to serve out the match in 2 sets, then ends up in a 3rd set buster.

Andujar had a confident opening and broke Starace early, while the Italian was serving at a high percentage it wasn’t doing much damage. Andujar on the ad side was taking away Starace’s favourite serve the kicker wide. He was stepping into the court and hitting backhands down the line, to keep him off balance. Andujar playing good all round clay court tennis and yes this includes volleys wins 6-1.

Starace who seemed a bit heavy legged and tired lifts his game to a higher level. Many of the service games are hard fought this time around, but Andujar had the answers. The forehand doing the damage, the backhand solid and came into the net on good stuff.
Once Andujar broke for the final time he was able to serve out the match and well deserved winner of his first title.

As for Sweeting, less said the better.

2 comments:

The same said...

Mrs Andujar IS happy with this write up especially since your next one will be on MC and she can feel it she will not like it one bit :(

Marc said...

Kavcic what a choke that was, but as was said have to recover from this bad moment.

Andujar was excellent and Barcelona next tournament for him.