Week 23 Wrap-up and Week 24 Preview

Well, that was a surprise. The two finals which took place yesterday ended up going exactly the opposite way I would have expected. The match between Fish and Querrey, while a fairly tight match, ended up with a convincing win for Querrey, while Federer somehow managed to lose to Hewitt in a tough three-setter.

The match between Fish and Querrey was dominated by serve, but it looked like the veteran had the stronger start. He started the match with 0-40 in Querrey's first service game. Unfortunately, after Querrey served his way out of that problem, then Fish didn't get another break point chance. The set went to a tiebreak, where Sam dominated. In the second set, Fish looked like he might turn the match around. He broke Querrey and served for the set at 5-4, but unfortunately couldn't keep it together and lost the next three games.

This is about par for both players, as Fish drops to a miserable 3-11 in tournament finals, while Querrey wins his third title of the year, and on three different surfaces no less. Unfortunately, Querrey doesn't have a lot to gain, ranking-wise, from winning more of these 250-level tournaments. He needs to make some noise at the masters and grand slams in order to move any further up the rankings. Fish, on the other hand, gained a great deal from his final appearance, and while he's only up to 70 in the world, that is an increase of 20 places from where he was last week. A good result from both players.

The Federer-Hewitt match, on the other hand, was somewhat bizarre. Federer looked to be cruising, up a set, and having come back from a break down already in the second, he had break points on Hewitt's serve at 4-all, which would have essentially sealed the deal. But after Hewitt saved those, he somehow managed to pull out the tiebreak and then break Federer at the start of the third set. At that point, Federer's game started getting sloppy, as he began hitting more errors and outright shanking a few balls. Hewitt held serve through to the end, and notched his first win against Federer in his last 15 tries, and Federer got only his second loss on grass in his last 77 matches on the surface. Really stunning stuff, and it's tough to imagine that Federer is going to be very confident heading into Wimbledon, considering that he hasn't won a title this year since the Australian Open.

Looking ahead to the two tournaments on offer this week - the week before a slam is always interesting, because the top players generally take the week off to rest up for the coming tournament, but the players who are just outside the top 100 need to qualifying to get into the slam, so you get a bunch of players mostly outside the top 20 but inside the top 100 competing. It can lead to some interesting match-ups.

This is particularly true due to several players who are coming off long lay-offs to resume play this week. In Eastbourne, James Blake opens against Julien Benneteau and Gilles Simon opens against Evgeny Korolev. Also look for the opening-round match between qualifiers Nishikori and Kuznetsov, who could get Simon in the second round. Almagro is the top seed here, and he should do well, despite having an atrocious 3-6 career record on grass. Also be on the lookout for Dudi Sela and Feliciano Lopez, who had big wins last week at Queens.

Also in Eastbourne, Kim Clijsters is back in action, as well as Caroline Wozniacki, French Open champ Francesca Schiavone, Li Na - who had a great win yesterday over Maria Sharapova in the final at Birmingham - and even slumping Svetlana Kuznetsova got a wildcard into the tourney. In one of the best opening rounds, Sam Stosur opens against Melanie Oudin, who's having a bit of a sophomore slump this year. That's a pretty impressive draw, I have to say. The top eight seeds are from the top 12 players in the world! After how barren last week's draw was, that is amazing.

The other tournament going on this week is in s'Hertogenbosch, in the Netherlands, but I'm just going to refer to it as the Unicef Open in the tags, because I'll never spell that right again. The draw here isn't quite as stacked on either side, but it still has some great players. Ljubicic is the top seed on the men's side, and he'll have to watch out for Marcos Baghdatis and Tommy Robredo. Chardy and Clement are floating there in the draw, as are Malisse and Becker. It could develop into a good tournament too, depending on how the first couple rounds go.

On the women's side, it's all about one person: top seeded Justine Henin, who is aching to win Wimbledon this year and needs this warm-up tournament to get her into a grass-court mentality. She shouldn't have too much trouble with this event, though, as second seeded Dinara Safina has - regrettably - already lost in the first round. Other than that, Ivanovic is in the dra, and a lot of very strong but not especially accomplished players. Henin couldn't have asked for much more to get her in the right frame of mind for a big run at Wimbledon.

In a day or two, I'll take a look at the qualifying draws for Wimbledon, which have some exciting match-ups of their own. Enjoy the tennis!