Week 42 Quarterfinals

The big news of the week so far is that Roger Federer played his 900th ATP-level match on Wednesday, as he brutalized poor American Taylor Dent in under an hour. He's showing no signs of slowing, and barring an injury Other than that, the other interesting story of the week has been the mass exodus of seeds from both Moscow and Stockholm. Of the sixteen seeded players, only six have made it to the quarterfinal round. And eight of those players had a first-round bye.

Three of the seeded players to crash out are still in the running for the ATP year-end finals - Mikhail Youzhny withdrew with illness, while Tomas Berdych was bested in a fairly straightforward match with the flying Finn Jarkko Nieminen, and JW Tsonga was just a bit too error-prone against Viktor Troicki. He lost the second set on a fairly lucky net cord against him on break point, but he had his chances in the third set, and when the big points came up, he just couldn't find the court.

Of the remaining seeds, two of them are facing off tomorrow. Roger Federer takes on Stan Wawrinka, which has the potential to be an interesting match. Fed leads the head to head 5-1, but Wawrinka suggested that he may be a new player during the U.S. Open. He should have had enough time to recover from playing his heart out in Flushing and then in the Davis Cup playoff, so this will be an interesting test to see if new coach Peter Lundgren has really had an effect on the number two Swiss.

Hometown boy Robin Soderling gets German Florian Mayer in the quarters, and he should have a fairly easy win - Mayer can be a good player, but he isn't anywhere near consistent enough from point to point and match to match to handle the kind of player that Soderling has become. And Ivan Ljubicic gets Croatian qualifier Ivan Dodig, which should be a win for the veteran. The other quarterfinal in Stockholm is actually perhaps the most interesting, as it features a pair of veteran players on the comeback trail - James Blake and aforementioned Finn. Blake has had a much worse year (his ranking is 90 points Nieminen's) but he also leads the head-to-head 6-0. Nieminen is an exceptional mover and counter-puncher, while Blake can hit through just about anybody when he's on his game. Blake also has a great record at this tournament, so this one could be fun to watch. A great contrast in styles from two very experienced and interesting players.

The picture is even bleaker for the seeds in Moscow - and for the hometown boys as well! After Youzhny pulled out of the tournament, Davydenko lost in the first round to Pablo Cuevas, which is a match that last year's Davydenko never would have come close to losing. The only Russian left in the draw is Igor Kunitsyn, who faces off against up-and-coming Uzbek Denis Istomin. Another player in the same kind of career position is Alexandr Dolgopolov, who plays Marcos Baghdatis in the quarterfinals.

Baggy is one of the two remaining seeds in Moscow, the other being Radek Stepanek, who faces Pablo Cuevas. Neither Stepanek nor Baghdatis has had the kind of season that they would have hoped for, after great starts to the season. And Baghdatis is defending points from winning this championship last year - both could use deep runs or even a win here. The last quarterfinal is between Viktor Troicki and Horacio Zeballos. The Argentine is best on clay, and based on what I've seen from him, he always will be, while Troicki is starting to show levels of his game that I haven't seen before. He's still having problems closing out matches - see both Nadal and Djokovic in the past month - but he's played well enough to beat both of them.

We'll see if the seed exodus continues this week - we could have some relative newcomers lifting trophies come Sunday!