Howdy. Just dropping by to provide y'all with a place to gather and work out the mysteries of the bakery, aka the draw for the Sony Ericsson Open. As many of you know, I find bracketology a fairly benign and often entertaining drill (for others, if not me), but don't have any faith in its importance. Any player's draw is only as tough - or weak - as the level of the men or women on any given day make it, and looking more than a round ahead (as tennis players themselves often tell us) could serve as a functional definition of the proverbial warning: Don't count your chickens before the eggs are hatched. . .
I mean, who among you looked at the Indian Wells draw and exclaimed, Uh-oh! Rafa might get Ivan Ljubicic in the semis! First round pairings, fine. But look beyond the opener at your peril.Well, he gets Tommy Robredo unless Monaco gets past Simon and takes Robredo out, just doesn't cut it.
Todd and in Charge will be poking around Key Biscayne for us in the coming days (probably on Thursday and Friday) and we'll have a few dispatches from him. I leave for the Key early Monday morning and will be there for the entire main-draw week. I haven't been on-site at an event in some time, so I'm looking forward to it.
We touched on a potentially interesting theme in our latest podcast (it should go live in a few hours), which is that many of the Big Guns in tennis were strangely silent or simply misfired at Indian Wells. That may give the usual suspects, starting with Roger Federer, extra incentive to make a statement on Key Biscayne. It would be odd if not impossible that we get through the US Masters Slam without the top two or three men or women bagging either title, so Miami may be more competitive than ever before.
Enjoy the warm-ups, everyone. We'll start full-on coverage at TW tomorrow.
--- Pete