Paris Masters, 2nd Round

In the last tournament of the regular season for the ATP Tour, the third day of play was deceptively exciting. Considering that only two seeded players were upset and ten made it through, you wouldn't think that would make for one of the most exciting tennis days of the year, and one that compares with the first Saturday of the 2008 Australian Open, which is the most exciting single day of tennis that I can recall.

The two upsets were both thrilling matches, one was shocking and the other didn't come as much of a surprise. Tommy Haas had been struggling with illness - swine flu, in fact - and so there wasn't a lot of expectation for him to win over French stalwart and qualifier Arnaud Clement. But Haas won the first set and took it to a tiebreak in the third, losing a match point before Clement took the win. The shocking result was Roger Federer losing in three to Julien Benneteau, who had never before taken a set in their two previous meetings. Benneteau played out of his mind to win the second-set tiebreak and then break Federer in the third before he served it out.

In the other matches, Del Potro was pushed to a third set in his first match back after the U.S. Open by a retiring Marat Safin, who put on a pretty good show in his last professional match, but seemed to be happy to have it all done. I don't think he'll be back. That ceremony was pretty exciting, and it was followed by an out-of-sorts Rafael Nadal escaping by the skin of teeth against Nicolas Almagro. The older but less experienced Spaniard was dominating the match while Nadal was lagging, and Almagro led by a break in each set. He served for the match twice and was broken both times. Finally, he cramped in the third set and basically stood by and watched Nadal take the match. Almagro, when first serving for the match, had 40-0 on serve, and couldn't close it out. Tough loss for him - you know he'll be working on his conditioning in the offseason.

The other matches were also good, but less stunning than those above. Big servers and frequent spoilers Ivo Karlovic and John Isner could have ended the End of Year Championships hopes for Robin Soderling and Fernando Gonzalez, but both of the giants lost in two sets. James Blake nearly managed to salvage a bit of his season by taking Andy Murray to two tiebreaks, but ended up losing his match in three.

Some very competitive tennis - not all of it scintillating, but all of it exciting. This kind of play this late in the year does not do much for the argument about shortening the season. As sympathetic as I am to the players, as a fan, I wish I could have this every day.