Week 30 Semifinals

Some big surprises in the quartefinals, today. Two out of three top seeds went down rather tamely, and there were a handful of other upsets as well.

I'll start in Umag, where they had to play eight matches today, after yesterday's rain. Ljubicic managed to beat Ivan Dodig in three sets, but then he didn't have anything left in his tank for Potito Staracce. He almost eked out the second set tiebreak - I believe that he had three set points before he lost the last five in a row to drop the tiebreak 8-6. Jurgen Melzer also seemed to run out of steam, after he beat Jan Hajek while dropping just a single game, he only managed to win five in his second match against Andreas Seppi. All in all, a good day for Italians!

Nikolay Davydenko's loss was a bit tougher for me to understand. He had a day of rest, and his first match against Stephane Robert was easy. But he was never in the match against Juan Ignacio Chela. Chela is a great player, no doubt, and for some reason he has Davydenko's number. The Argentine is now 6-1 against the world number six. Ferrero was the only favorite player who made it through cleanly, and I see him getting through to the final.

Gstaad only had one real upset, but it was a doozy - top seeded Russian Mikhail Youzhny lost to 31-year old Kazakh qualifier Yuri Schukin, who has an 11-20 ATP record in the 11 years he's been a pro. Surely this is his biggest scalp, and quite a shock that Youzhny dropped that match. His road only gets tougher, facing Richard Gasquet in the next round, and then - in all likelihood - Nicolas Almagro in the final. I'd really expect Almagro and Gasquet to meet at that stage, which would be quite an exciting match-up.

In Los Angeles, the only technical upset was Janko Tipsarevic over Marcos Baghdatis, but that was always going to be a close match. Rainier Schuettler nearly managed to beat Sam Querrey, and by all rights should have, but the defending champ just barely managed to eke out a victory - the match ended with four consecutive breaks of serve, and two of those were Querrey breaking the German as he served for the match. It was a high-quality match from the counterpunching veteran, who is one of the oldest players in the top hundred. It's got to be brutal to lose a close match like that, at this stage of his career. But kudos to Sam for finding a way to get through.

Andy Murray had a tight first set against Alejandro Falla, but then cruised through the second after winning the tiebreak. The match between James Blake and Feliciano Lopez was a lot tighter, and James barely ended up losing the match, but it was very, very tight. I hope he'll be encouraged by his performance, which was his strongest showing since he came back from his injury. He would have felt a lot better if he won that match, but Lopez is a tough customer with a big lefty serve. No shame for a somewhat rusty Blake to come off (just barely) second best in that one.

I expect Murray and Querrey to get through to the finals, but if Tipsarevic finishes what Schuettler couldn't, it should be interesting. "Tipsy" beat Murray earlier this year in Dubai, but he has never won a title. He also just got married, which may have given him the grounding he needed to make a breakthrough. We'll see!