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By Chris Oddo | Wednesday October 10, 2018


The Asian swing in tennis has the one great disadvantage of beginning after the Grand Slam season has come and gone, at a time when the game’s best players are either resting their aching bones or licking their near-mortal wounds. Tour vets try to put on a brave face and soldier on, nine months deep into a torturous schedule that never EVER seems to let up, but it is not easy.

Sometimes it’s not pretty, the tennis we see from Asia. Think short fuses, the slow degradation of the will to win at all costs and changeover dreams of beachfront accommodations…

And that is where we stand on October 10th, with less than three weeks of WTA Tennis left to play, and less than six weeks of ATP Tennis if you don’t count Davis Cup. Many players are on their proverbial last leg, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t high-stakes tennis to play.

Tennis Express

With that in mind, here are five thoughts on what we saw last week in Beijing and Tokyo.

1. Beware of Basilashvili

The first Georgian to ever claim and ATP title now has two, and remarkably both of Nikoloz Basilashvili’s titles have come at the 500 level this season, making the 26-year-old the only player on the ATP tour to have won two at that level in 2018. It’s a remarkable story, and Basilashvili is a remarkable player. That much was made obvious last week at the China Open when he hit the cover off the ball through five rounds, not dropping a set and finishing off his week with a step-up performance to defeat Juan Martin del Potro 6-3, 6-3 in the final.

Del Potro was clearly not feeling great during this match, anybody tuning in could see—he wore his pain on his face like a badge of honor—but don’t let that color your impression of Basilashvili’s achievement. The Georgian has emerged as one of the more impressive ball-strikers on tour at the moment. His level of commitment to his strikes is a key factor in his rise; the more he puts into his strokes the deeper and the more piercing they seem to be. Basilashvili may not be a first-rate tactician at this stage of his career, but the pure, emboldened SIZZLE of his ground game puts him in a position to wreak havoc on all comers.


Not surprisingly Basilashvili’s relentless style of play has started to pay dividends this season and he really raised a lot of eyebrows when he pushed Rafael Nadal to four sets at the U.S. Open, where he was making his first second-week appearance at a major.

It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here, now that he’s on the cusp of the Top 20, with not very many points to defend at the Masters 1000 level for the next 52 weeks. Does he have what it takes to follow-through, or will his emergence motivate other players to make a point of finding and exploiting his weaknesses, whatever they may be?

2. Sabalenka and Osaka are still hammering away and rising up the rankings

Speaking of total commitment to strikes, how about Aryna Sabalenka? The Belarusian’s rise in 2018 has a lot to do with her physicality and her power—both physically and mentally. We’ve seen counterpunchers take charge of the WTA Tour in the last year or so; players like Simona Halep, Sloane Stephens and Angelique Kerber have risen to the pinnacle of the sport, but the rise of Sabalenka and Naomi Osaka my signal the beginning of a reversion on the WTA Tour. Power tennis, of course, will never be dead, but it could very well reach new heights with Sabalenka and Osaka paving the way.

Both players have generated quite a bit of buzz since the U.S. Open, with Osaka reaching the final in Tokyo and the semis at Beijing (she’s now inside the Top 5 and the first woman from Japan to do that in over 20 years), while Sabalenka went on an eight-match tear that took her to the title at Wuhan and the quarterfinals at Beijing. Sabalenka’s win over Garbine Muguruza at Beijing may have been her most impressive (the Spaniard really seemed to want that win, and was playing well, but just couldn’t find a way to thwart the fiery Sabalenka), but during her streak she has mowed down a laundry list of top players—Svitolina, Barty, Kontaveit, Garcia, Suarez Navarro among them.

Osaka’s Asian swing has been equally impressive, and perhaps even more so given that she could be forgiven for a letdown after winning her first major title and experiencing all the weirdness that came attached to that controversial, fateful U.S. Open final with Serena Williams.

3. Medvedev, the Confounding Force



What makes Russia’s Daniil Medvedev such a tough player to play against? He’s unorthodox. He’s deceptively powerful. And he’s tactically prescient. There’s a lot working in Medvedev’s favor, and that has been the case for a while, but in 2018 the 22-year-old has created a puzzle that has proven challenging to solve, even for some of the tour’s top players. He’s a nightmare matchup for so many players because he hits a flat ball that stays low and scoots through the court, especially on faster, lower-bouncing surfaces.

In today’s game so many players are bread-and-butter topspin players (think round rather than flat hitters), and most of the tour has become comfortable facing and dealing with mega spin, even if it comes with burning pace. But Medvedev comes from left field with his off-kilter groundstrokes and his spidery strokes. Factor in a big, accurate (also flat) serve and some eye-opening quickness and you have a winning combination. He’s going to be a dangerous player throughout his career, because he’s unique—and forceful. There are very few hitting partners that can simulate Medvedev’s strikes. It gives the Russian an advantage and it causes players to have to rush and made adjustments just to rally with him.

Tecnifibre T-Fight

In the Tokyo final Kei Nishikori came in red hot left ice cold—it was basically like he saw a ghost on the other side of the net. Nishikori had no answer for Medvedev’s game on that relatively fast indoor surface. He wasn’t the only one. Medvedev didn’t drop a set in the main draw (he did drop one in qualifying) and he took out three Top 20 players en route to his biggest title to date. As the Russian improves his execution and grows his confidence, knowing that he can be a force to be reckoned with if he imposes himself, look for him to go even higher in the rankings and to have lots of success on the faster surfaces.

4. Tsitsipas Continues to Impress with Consistency

Everybody knows this: It’s been a breakout year for Greek Stefanos Tsitsipas, and we’re not talking about as a photographer. Sure, #SteveTheHawk is a good follow on Instagram, but the 20-year-old has done his best work on the tennis court in 2018, where he has racked up six Top 10 wins and risen to a career-high No.15 in the world.

And that fantastic year continues.

Tsitsipas shook off the post U.S. Open hangover to reach the Tokyo semis last week, and once again he impressed with his consistency and his ability to step up to the plate and produce winning tennis despite the fact that fatigue is really starting to settle in at this late juncture of the season.

That’s what has been the most impressive about the Greed in 2018. His rise hasn’t been about sudden flashes of brilliance surrounded by the head-scratching flops that are so common among players his age. Au contraire, Tsitsipas has emerged as a very professional, focused pro, and he puts his best foot forward every time he steps on the court. Winning is contagious and Tsitsipas seems to inherently know this, so he does everything in his power keep getting deep into draws. He doesn’t lose a lot of first-round matches (a few more than usual lately—see fatigue), and seems to be advanced in the art of getting acclimated to a new court, new conditions and a new opponent. He’s a fast learner, and that ability to make the adjustments in a new city, new surface, new venue are really helping Tsitsipas as he navigates the tricky terrain of the ninth month of his first full year on tour.

He gets full marks so far, and it seems it is only a matter of time before he reaches the Top 10 and plays his first Slam quarterfinal.

5. Nishikori’s Base is Built

It has been, in many ways, a wildly successful season for Japan’s Kei Nishikori. In February, when he returned to the Challenger circuit to begin his season with questions marks about his form and fitness, nobody knew for sure what kind of tennis that Nishikori would be able to produce this season.

Heck, we didn’t even know if his wrist would hold up.

Eight months later Nishikori has answered a lot of questions, impressively. Though he’ll likely fall short in his quest to qualify for the ATP Finals, Nishikori has done more than enough to set the table for an even better 2019. He made a major breakthrough at Monte-Carlo, where he reached his fourth career Masters 1000 final, then he reached the last eight at Wimbledon for the first time in July. Two months later Nishikori took another step when he reached the U.S. Open semifinals.

And finally, last week, Nishikori made it back to the final in Tokyo.

It was a good result but it also stung. Nishikori has now lost eight consecutive finals and he has not won an ATP title in his last 47 events. But given all that Nishikori has accomplished in 2018, it might not be such a bad thing that a few carrots are still dangling in front of him. The good news is that he’s healthy once again, and showing plenty of signs that he’s ready to make a return to the Top 5. If this year was about proving that he can still be a factor on tour, the logical progression would be for 2019 to be about rising even higher.




 

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