It wasn’t quite the dream draw but nor was it the nightmare it could have been as Andy Murray avoided Roger Federer but drew Rafael Nadal in the group stages of the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals, which begin in London on Sunday. According to ESPN, Djokovic comes into the tournament on a 22-match winning streak after winning the US Open and he has won the tourney four times, including the past three years.
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Roger Federer and Tomas Berdych will continue Group Stan Smith singles action when they clash at the ATP World Tour Finals on Sunday.
The Serb arrives in south-east London hoping to win the prestigious season-ending event for a fifth time to cap another remarkable year that saw him win three Grand Slam crowns. Instead, the eight contestants have been divided into two groups; they will play a round robin within those groups, and then the top four players will enter the semifinals.
There has been locker-room discussion about the problem, now and in the past, although Murray says it is hard to say if any suspicions about fellow players are well-founded.
I like the chances of Wawrinka in this group and if you’re looking for anyone to oppose Djokovic with it would have to be the Swiss, who has a fine chance of winning the group and making the final. The Spaniard faces Stan Wawrinka in the first match on Monday.
“I believe that it’s not fair that a player like me really never played on a surface that was a little bit more favourable”, Nadal told The Daily Mail. Instead first up for Federer is Tomas Berdych, a player who has not had as much success in London, but still presents a danger. However, with one eye surely on the Davis Cup final against Belgium, Murray may be privately contented to slip out at that stage with pride intact and a respectable bank of ranking points accumulated. I would not be surprised to see Wawrinka power through the Scot, as he did last time they met. “I did a session every day, which helps with my movement and flexibility”. He has since come into his own and shown he can compete at the top with two Grand slam titles under his belt at the Australian Open in 2014 and at this year’s French Open. The O2 Arena’s court will be the same blue on blue scheme, the “preferred” colors of all ATP World Tour hard court events.
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It has been no secret that he has been preparing on the clay, and will be hitting for the first time on the indoor hard court today, but actually seemed quite hopeful! The one who can hustle the planet’s best tennis player with his sublime backhands and pierce a virtually impregnable defence at will? The last meeting between these two was in this year’s Paris Masters, a match that Murray won in straight sets. Of course the last couple of generations we’ve seen have not been as strong as the Rafa generation. Since the US Open, he’s won the Kuala Lumpur 250 and the Vienna 500.
