Lucky Star

And so the last, LAST event of the year has finished, with the Pro circuit event in Sorrento wrapping up. I can't say I am too familiar with the people that won - Marinko Matosevic in the men's and Olivia Rogowska in the women's. I don't have too much more to say about that, except that this Matosevic character has apparently won four Pro circuit titles this year... maybe he'll graduate to Futures or even Challengers at some stage. He is exactly four years younger than Roger Federer... I suppose you could say he was thus born under a tennis lucky star.

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And how about Cedric Pioline? Knocking out Pete Sampras - God, I bet that felt sweet, though I'm sure he would have preferred to have done it a little earlier in his career! - then going on to beat Greg Rusedski for his first seniors tour title. I confess I don't follow the seniors tour very much, which I suppose is a shame, because it looks kind of interesting... actually, Jonas Bjorkman said when he retired that he'd played on the regular tour for so long he could go straight on the seniors tour. Ah, Jonas...

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So what is the point of the seniors tour, exactly? Is it just a chance to set up epic grudgematches, like the Sampras/Pioline rematch? How serious is it? Is it just a group of old guys kicking around having fun or do they really get down and dirty?

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I would like to note that I exempt John McEnroe from this question. He would get down and dirty with anyone, anywhere, anytime...

Hotel Sorrento

Pete Sampras. Cedric Pioline. Could be epic. Here's hoping it is. I'd like to see Pioline avenge his Slam losses, but I'm backing Pistol Pete on this one. Just a feeling.

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Anyway, we're not talking about Pete and le Ced today. No, it's back to local homegrown Aussie tennis and what is apparently the last Pro circuit event of the year, the tournie in Sorrento. Quality tournament, they say... but that doesn't mean people will have heard of most of the guys. Ah, Aussie tennis.

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What is disturbing me is that at least half of Australia's Davis Cup team is playing this tournament - a tournament on a circuit so low I hadn't even heard of its existence until a few months ago. Top seed and hot favourite is Brydan Klein, then second seed is Sam Groth. Marinko Matosevic defeated Bernard Tomic today, who retired after what one presumes was an injury and hopes wasn't a temper tantrum... I've heard he's prone. There's our Davis Cup team, pretty much. Oh dear.

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That said, here's hoping Brydan or Sam can win this one... though I'm liking the form of our old man Andrew Coelho, who pulled that good win the other week in Perth. Maybe he can join team Davis Cup next year when we play our (next) relegation tie?

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...remember when we used to win Davis Cup?

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Bernard will save us. HE MUST!

The World Below The Surface

It's rather hard to write about tennis when there's no tennis to write about. I'm going to have to think about how to manage Tennis From The Backseat while we're in the off-season - it seems a little extravagant to write about tennis every day when there's no tennis to write about! But the blog will keep going strong into the New Year, bringing us back to where we started - the Australian tennis summer, my favourite swing of the tour (for obvious reasons.)

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Tennis Australia has also realised the dearth of stuff to write about now everyone's on holiday - but instead of writing about the Davis Cup final like normal people, they've done a list of how the Australians have been doing this week. No one's been playing on any of the major tours, but in Challengers and stuff there've been quite a few active. Let's have a look at the men's singles highlights (this list had no women on it anywhere. Are there just no women's events this week? We don't suck that badly.)

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*Chris Guccione reached the semifinal at the ATP Challenger event in Jersey, Great Britain.

*Carsten Ball was a quarterfinalist at the ATP Challenger event in Champaign, USA.

*Steven Goh qualified and reached the quarterfinal at the ITF Futures event in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia.

*Zachary Van Min qualified at the ITF Futures event in Queretaro, Mexico.

*Matt Reid reached the quarterfinal at the ITF Futures event in Honolulu, USA.

*Isaac Frost qualified at the ITF Futures event in Honolulu, USA.

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Reading lists like these, it makes you realise just how hard tennis is, particularly for the kids starting out. There's this whole tennis pantheon of celebrities - your Federers and Nadals and Safins and so forth - but underneath it all is this seething mass of people dying for a chance. Chris Guccione is ranked in the top hundred and he's still losing in Challenger events. That top echelon is really pretty damn small, when you think about it. Imagine if you play all your life and you get to about #200. Out of three billion or so people, #200 is pretty damn good - but in tennis terms, that's nothing of anything. Some minor Challenger or Futures victories, maybe... a lifetime on the pro circuit. You're good, but not quite good enough.

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Tennis isn't like music - it's not like lurking down in the #300s is some brilliant player who simply has to be discovered and will shoot straight to #1, winning umpteen Aria awards or whatever along the way. The guys in the top echelon are genuinely the best - because they beat everyone else. If there's one thing you can say about tennis, it's that the people at the top genuinely deserve to be there. (Except maybe Djokovic. Because I don't like him. The last two years have been a massive fluke, mark my words.) It must be so incredibly tough to be one of the little guys, schlepping away in Challengers and Futures, knowing that there is no quick fix. There's only hard work, a lot of it - and even then, you might not still be good enough. The guys ahead of you are just that little bit more talented, have those few extra shots... and though you can get a long way by hard work, sometimes it's just not enough.

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Taking that into consideration, it's amazing that the guys at the top aren't total tosspots with egos the size of Mt Isa (apparently the biggest city in the world in terms of space. Just so my imagery makes sense.) They are the best of the best of the best - because there are a whole lotta tennis players, and they've beaten them all. So congratulations, Roger and Rafa, for being genuinely nice guys.

The Hidden Circuit

One of the lead stories on the Tennis Australia website today is that Monique Adamczak and Nick Lindahl (both young Australian players, for those of you who don't know the names) have won events on the '2008-09 Pro Circuit.' Now, I'm mystified. What on earth is this so-called Pro Circuit?

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Adamczak and Lindahl are not very highly ranked players - Adamczak is somewhere in the late #100s and Lindahl in the #200s, so presumably this Pro Circuit is not especially prestigious. The tournament that they won the men's and women's singles in was in Rockhampton, so it's hardly a travel-around-the-world international affair. Oh, wait - I've found a page on Tennis Australia about it. It says:

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'The tennis Pro Circuit is a series of international entry level events onto the professional tour. These events provide an opportunity for players to earn their first world ranking points, which is a players' livelihood as a professional player. The tennis Pro Circuit is a vital step for all tennis players as they embark on professional careers. Positioned as a bridge between junior events and the elite WTA and ATP tournaments the circuit, it is the breeding ground for future champions.'

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That makes sense, I suppose - but surely Monique Adamczak is a bit past that stage? She's played in Slams - surely she should be playing ITF events... her ranking is high enough to get into most of those, yeah? She's professional, not jumping the gap between the two - though looking at her profile, she hasn't been playing much tennis, either at WTA or ITF level. She's made it to some semi-finals, but that's about it. She was born in 1983 and turned pro in 1998, by the looks of it... she's had some career success on the ITF circuit with four title but not that much recently - and now she's back playing on the Pro Circuit. She was the top seed in Rockhampton.

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That's really a bit demoralising, but well done Monique Adamczak, nonetheless.

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Nick Lindahl is a bit of a different story... I remember him playing in juniors a couple of years back, and he was no Tomic, but he was pretty good. I haven't really seen him since - the ATP has no record of him turning pro, though presumably he did, because he played quarter finals in a Challenger event... do you have to be a professional to play Challengers? Maybe you don't. He was the second seed in the event at Rockhampton.

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It's funny, isn't it, to actually see the evidence of the work that players do to get to the top? You sort of assume they have to work their way up, but I've never really thought about how they did that. It'd be the rare junior that jumped straight onto the ATP or WTA circuit - I suppose, in recent memory, Alize Cornet has done it, and maybe Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, but let's have a look at recent junior Slam winners for boys, and see where they are now. In 2007, Donald Young won the US Open for boys, and in 2006 Thiemo de Bakker won junior Wimbledon, but we have to go back to 2005 before we start getting any really familiar names - the champions that year were Young, Marin Cilic, Jeremy Chardy and Ryan Sweeting. That was 2005, and now we're in 2008, and if we take Cilic as our example case, it has taken him about three years to be a regular on the ATP circuit. He didn't even qualify for the US Open last year.

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So where was Marin in these few years? Playing Challengers and Futures, no doubt, but maybe he was hanging about on the Pro Circuit too. So maybe I should pay more attention to this hitherto unheard-of circuit... perhaps I can claim I saw the next Roger Federer play before he was famous!

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Today's Results

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TOE Life Ceramics Guangzhou International Women's Open (Guangzhou)

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Olga Govortsova def. Yan Zi, 6-3 6-2

Mariya Koryttseva def. Akgul Amanmuradova, 6-4 6-4

Karin Knapp def. Zhang Shuai, 7-6 (8-6) 1-6 6-1

Alla Kudryavtseva def. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, 6-4 4-6 6-3

Ioana Raluca Olaru def. Aniko Kapros, 6-7 (5-7) 6-4 6-1

Lu Jingjing def. Ekaterina Dzehalevich, 7-6 (7-4) 6-2