Dubai Tennis Championship - March 16, 2021

avatar
(Edited)

After the big event that took place last month in Australia, today I got to enjoy the two matches of the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championship. Maybe enjoy is not appropriate here as both matches were painful to watch so to speak.

The championship is also known as Dubai Open, but also as Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships for sponsorship reasons and that's the name you see on the banners as well.

Up until now the tournament level was 250 but starting from this year the ATP upgraded the tournament to a more prestigious 500 level.

image.png
source

This is not a Grand Slam tournament, therefore the top ten players are not really present here. This year we had two of them, Dominic Thiem and Andrey Rublev. Of the two, Dominic Thiem is the one that had a high chance of winning the championship as he's No. 4 at the moment.

image.png
source

Today he met the South African Lloyd Harris, No. 81 ATP at the moment. Personally I've never heard of him, let alone see him playing. Without any doubt I could see the outcome of the match before even started. Then came the cold shower.

Dominic lost the first set, which is not unusual. Even the best of the best lose the first set sometimes and then win the next two or the rest. It's like getting to know the opponent and finding the rhythm. I thought that's the case here but it wasn't. Dominic looked tired and somehow nothing went as it should have been.

I don't know what the problem was. There was no news about Dominic being injured but these details are usually kept in secret. The bottom line is, he lost and what is even worth, he lost to a low ranking player.

The South African Lloyd Harris is definitely a player to pay attention to in the future. He was good today, played quality tennis and won, not just got lucky because his opponent wasn't good. We may see him in high ranking tournaments in a couple of years.

image.png
source

The other disappointment of the day was the Belgian David Goffin, who met with the Japanese Kei Nishikori, who's No. 41 ATP. Goffin I have seen playing a few times and know he's good but Nishikori is unknown to me, ut he was way better than Goffin.

image.png
source

This is the schedule for tomorrow. Four matches of which three are already looking attractive. Khachanov, Karatsev, Sinner and Bautista are good and Sonego as well as he made history last year when he won against Djokovic, who I guess got bored and lost the match deliberately.

I'm not sure how much time I'm going to have tomorrow, but would be great to watch some. The best thing about these low rank tournaments is that we get to see new players that could be the next generation as the famous 3 or four will not be here forever.



0
0
0.000
0 comments