A Couple Young Guns and Some Old Hat

As is so often the case, tennis players got right back to work after the Australian Open, some traveling halfway across the world to compete in tournaments this past week. And impressively, when all was said and done, we not only saw some recently-struggling stars start to turn things around, but a couple relative newcomers prove they're here for the long haul.

🤩 @iga_swiatek soared to the @AdelaideTennis title with a straight sets victory over Bencic!

More on her near-flawless performance --> https://t.co/PfKG7loQJo pic.twitter.com/AxlcKV2W0K

— wta (@WTA) February 27, 2021

I'll start in Adelaide where a slew of top shelf talent crowded the draw, and some strong workhorses stepped up to the challenges. Danielle Collins, who was somewhat surprisingly dismissed in the Australian Open second round, somewhat made up for it with a win over top seed and still-#1 Ashleigh Barty here. And Coco Gauff, who's been a little quiet since her breakthrough 2019 season, will make her top forty debut Monday after making the semis.

But ultimately the final came down to reigning French Open champion Iga Swiatek and former U.S. Open semifinalist Belinda Bencic, who'd only won a handful of matches since play resumed last August. She encouragingly put together a string of wins this week, but was ultimately no match for the nineteen-year-old Pole. Swiatek hit 22 winners and just 6 errors in the barely hour-long match, dominating on serve and breaking her opponent four times. In what was just her third championship round, she showed nerves and came away with the trophy without losing a set the whole tournament -- she didn't lose one during that Roland Garros run either. And with two titles now, on two surfaces, she's really proving the force she's going to be.

Meanwhile at the inaugural Singapore Open, another young talent made us sit up and take notice. Twenty-one year old Alexei Popyrin, who'd outlasted David Goffin in a nearly four-hour marathon in Melbourne before falling in another five-setter to Lloyd Harris, rebounded nicely at this event. While he was able to avoid a second round rematch with Harris, who lost his opener to wildcard Adrian Andreev, and second-seeded countryman John Millman eliminated for him, he did face former U.S. Open champ Marin Cilic in the semis. The Croat, who'd lost his last four matches before this event, seemed to be pulling things together this week, but Popyrin was unperturbed and was able to notch the upset to make his first career final.

On Sunday he faced off against Alexander Bublik, who I feel is a better player than his #46 ranking suggests. With wins over Yoshihito Nishioka and Radu Albot this week, he too was looking for his first career title -- he'd come up short in his last three attempts, most recently at the start of the year in Antalya. He came up short here too -- after losing the first set, world #114 Popyrin stormed through the second to force a decider and never looked back. He won seven straight service games at love and only lost six points on serve total for the match. If his performance in Australia didn't put him on the map, his maiden title this week sure did, and hopefully it's just the start of what we'll see from him.

Of course, it wasn't just the new generation that came out swinging this past week. In Montpellier, it was two veterans who made good on their top seedings to make the final. Roberto Bautista Agut was hoping to turn around a slow start to the year -- after a perfect 6-0 record at ATP Cup in 2020, he was 1-2 this season and lost his first round at the Australian Open too. But he seemed back on trace in France, notching a solid win over dark horse Ugo Humbert in the quarters and following through in straight sets over Peter Gojowczyk to make the final.

In the bottom half of the draw, recently struggling David Goffin -- he ended 2020 with five straight match losses and had gone down this year twice in a row to players ranked outside of the top hundred -- seemed to right his course this week. Still seeded second thanks to that weird COVID-related ranking system, he pulled off an impressive win over a very talented Lorenzo Sonego and held tough against Egor Gerasimov to make the final. After he dropped the first set to RBA, I was sure he was done for, but the Belgian found the strength to rebound and come back for the win. It was his fifth career title and his first since 2017 -- and coming after so many months of hard knocks, it might not have come at a better time.

Finally in Córdoba, we'll get the perfect juxtaposition of the two themes of the week -- old versus new, veteran versus upstart. Thiry-three year old Albert Ramos-Viñolas is four years removed from his career-high ranking in the top twenty, and with seven first round losses since the lockdown, most people probably didn't give him much of a chance here. But he stunned top-seeded Diego Schwartzman in the quarters and backed it up with a win over another Argentine, Facundo Bagnis, in the semis.

Meanwhile, young Juan Manuel Cerundolo, only nineteen and ranked just #335 in the world, was playing his first ever tour-level tournament, and boy did he make a statement. After slogging through qualifying matches, he took out fellow young gun Thiago Seyboth Wild in his opener, and then got the better of two seeds in the next two rounds -- Miomir Kecmanovic and Thiago Monteiro. Can he possibly keep his Cinderella run going in tonight's final? Well, I suppose weirder things have happened.

And while the result may not have wider implications for the inevitable passing of the torch in this sport, it might just seal in the winner between the two generations for this week, at least.

Gearing Up

Exhibitions are underway, warm-up events are about to start -- the Australian Open is finally on the horizon, folks! And what we see this coming week could give us a good idea of what we might expect at the first Grand Slam of the year -- not only in terms of the action on court, but also for what sporting events could look like in a still very different sort of world.

Tennis 👏 Is 👏 Back 👏#AdelaideTennis pic.twitter.com/P7Rpuele32

— #AusOpen (@AustralianOpen) January 29, 2021

Yup, those are actual, real life fans in the stadium in Adelaide, watching Serena and Naomi battle it out. And they'll be there too when play starts in Melbourne next Monday -- officials announced this week that as many as 30,000 observers will be allowed at the event each day. That's about half the usual capacity of the Australian Open, but would still mark one of the biggest events since the COVID pandemic began.

In some ways, it makes sense that Australia would be the first site of somewhat normalized play -- already well-isolated from the rest of the world and having implemented some of the stictest lockdown measures, it's had fewer cases of the coronavirus in total than the U.S. has had deaths in just the past month, and less than a thousand fatalities in all. But that's not to say it's entirely in the clear, and some organizational hiccups have led to plenty of questions and consternation.

A spate of athletes -- and others -- who tested positive on arrival in Melbourne, plus anyone on their flights, were forced into a rigid two week quarantine and are only now getting back on actual courts. Some, like Paula Badosa, who got a positive test a week after touching down, may go straight from the hotel room to the match play, with no practice in between -- that's if she's well enough to compete at all. And, of course, there's no telling what might happen if more cases crop up as the main draws get underway.

Meanwhile this week, six separate tournaments will take place on the courts of Melbourne Park -- the ATP Cup, as well as the Grand Ocean Road and Murray River Cups for the men, and the Yarra Valley Classic and Gippsland and Grampians Trophy for the ladies. And it's the first time we'll see some big stars at work in a long time.

Ashleigh Barty, who other than an exhibition in Adelaide hasn't seen match play since the Australian last year, makes her return in a draw that features defending Melbourne champ Sofia Kenin and seven-time winner Serena Williams. And 2019 U.S. Open winner Bianca Andreescu hits the court for the first time since a knee injury took her out of that year's WTA Finals. And on the men's side Nick Kyrgios, who somehow became the voice of reason during the pandemic, is back in action for the Murray River crown.

And as interested as I am to see how these guys perform after such long hiatuses, it'll be even more worth watching whether these events go off without any major hitches. After all, the first priority is of course that everyone stays safe and that we get the virus under control. And hopefully officials have put in place all the steps we need to do that.

And just maybe sometime soon things will truly be back to normal.

The Rematch

I know we're just a few days away from the Australian Open, but today I want to take a little journey back in time to last year's French Open to make an observation. The ladies draw was weird, wasn't it? Now I say, again, that I hadn't been paying close attention to the game for some time, and so I wasn't too familiar with all the up-and-coming players who'd emerged over time -- but still! Players came out of nowhere to make the second week and beyond.

Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka, and Karolina Pliskova all lost in the third round, and fourth seeded Kiki Bertens was out by the second. While then defending champion Simona Halep made it to the quarters, by the time we got to the semis, the remaining ladies had an average ranking of #31 and two weren't seeded. I wouldn't have been able to name the runner-up a few days ago.

The careers of the two women who contested the final have gone in very different directions in the seven months since Roland Garros -- Ashleigh Barty converted her title run to a #1 ranking, a WTA Finals trophy, and a top seed at next week's Major. Marketa Vondrousova, meanwhile, is near a career high ranking, but lost in the first round at Wimbledon and was sidelined the rest of the year as a wrist injury and surgery kept her off the court through 2019.

Why do I bring this up now? Well, it turns out the two will face off again Thursday for a spot in the semifinals in Adelaide. And with the next Grand Slam on the horizon things might not go as we expect.

Barty, after all, didn't get off to the best start of the year. She lost her first match in Brisbane last week to qualifier Jennifer Brady an needed two hours and three sets to make it past Anastasia Pavlyucenkova in her opener here. Vondrousova, meanwhile, still ranked high enough for the eighth seed, has only lost three games this week, dealing Alina Rodionova a double bagel Wednesday in just fifty-one minutes.

Can she bring the same strength tomorrow? Probably -- after all, unbeknownst to me until now, she had some solid performances even before Paris last year, making the quarters in both Indian Wells and Miami, with wins over Simona Halep and Elise Mertens along the way. And while she only has one title to her name so far, at just 20 years of age, she's got plenty of time to start racking them up.

But maybe more immediate is the question of what a win tomorrow could mean for the coming fortnight. If Barty can manage a repeat, it could bode well for her confidence in Melbourne. But I gotta say, with no real basis for the statement other than a gut feeling, it seems this match is winnable for the young Czech.

And that might throw the draw wide open not just for the rest of this week, but into the Australian Open as well.