Young vs Kozlov Analysis: Like Creed vs Balboa

Announcers may not follow challengers that closely. Why should they?
I’ve seen that announcers so the best they can and like all people make mistakes. I think some announcers are terrible like Dick Enberg. Johnny McEnroe usually doesn’t know his left from his right when talking about a player he hasn’t seen before either, so it isn’t just Carillo.
So no this isn’t propaganda, it’s merely bad preparation. It would be great if announcers took more time to review the records of challenger players. Announcers also make the mistake of not doing their homework on players who may have some momentum but they are clouded by their memories of years bast – it would have been easy to look at last night’s match without mentioning as I’m sure they didn’t how badly DY felt after last years us open, where he played his heart out against Karlovic, or losing the dubs with alNick Monroe, who had to go to the hospital after that match.

I’d give a pass here from my perspective. Lets all not chew out Carillo. She’s made plenty of mistakes and sonhave all announcers.

To be honest I think I like the Aussie and south African announcers alone because of their accents. But I’ve heard a few podcasts from some other Aussie and British announcers for tennis and those nice accents can also peddle misinformed analysis of players that don’t take into account often the last seven months of a players matches.

Seven months is a lot of time. To be a little more impartial and to take a better view of facts and player records wouldn’t hurt!

It was a great match to watch, I loved the passion from both sides. Young is just a solid player that always puts up a fight. Should be a good matchup with Qball though I’m hoping Q keeps it rolling. As someone mentioned in another thread, Kozlov’s forehand is a huge liability. He needs to get that fixed before he can beat many top 100 players. Three 19 year olds: Kozlov, Tiafoe, Fritz; it will be fun to see who will be the first to break through into the top 50.

I’ve never ever seen a breaker where the guy who wins double-faulted four times in a row (to DY’s credit, he hit a big second serve on the fifth breaker point he served for a service winner) and both players serve was broken the first eight breaker points. You just don’t see such futility from two pro players.

Kozlov’s forehand is what I call a dumpster shot. It stinks, it’s not pro level, he can take the backhand early and drive it down the line, but he has problems doing anything offensively on the forehand. I’d say Koz’s forehand is worse than Delpo’s backhand.

Kozlov’s forehand indeed dumpster. Dan’s right. I love watching DY when he’s on, he’s clever, crafty, closes well. Just that when he isn’t, he seems like #301 in the world. His range is top twenty to #301.
You never know which DY shows up! The gunslinger or the double faulter.

Spadea should hit with him. He’d hit Kozlov off the court. Punish that fh wing.

Tsonga goes down! There goes my dark horse. Fognini took him out. Nice wins by Isner over Kukushkin and Nishioka over the monster Karlovic.

Tim Mayotte is right. Tomic also had major issues with the forehand wing. Gulbis forehand though lethal was also volatile and unpredictable. That said Zverev the elder doesn’t have a beautiful ground game – he has a superior net game. Al Berasetegui’s forehand (?) was awful. Edberg’s forehand was odd also.
Having a suck forehand isn’t the end of a player, just like Jack Sock having a suck backhand isn’t the end of Sock’s career – Sock runs around his backhand Courier style and he closes on the net as if his life depends on it.
Players can compensate.

OMG, Pospisil just defeated Murray in SS! So much for Andy’s cupcake draw and so much for my prediction that he would win this tourney. Pospisil played well overall, making some terrific volleys. Andy was off his game, for example he had 7 DFs to 2 aces.

Either the crowd was 80% Canadian or the ones who were there made a LOT of noise. Vasek is a player who feeds off that, so I think it was a big help in his win tonight. He is in desperate need of ranking points so this win is a big plus for that as well.

What is going on with the Canucks!? First, you had Raonic and then NBA players like Wiggins, Tristin Thompson and Thon Maker, he went there to go to prep school. And yes, there was Steve Nash, two time MVP, before that trio.

Now you’ve got Augur-Alissime and Shapalov and then Pospisil who was left for dead, beats Murray! What’s next, the Canucks are going to beat the Americans today in the World Baseball Classic!? It’s amazing though, sometimes, what a good coach can do for a player. Mark Woodforde, Pospisil’s new coach, I always thought was a very sharp tennis mind.

Dan, thank goodness some Canadian athletes are doing well in sports other than hockey. Although a Canuck did invent basketball, even if it was in Boston, so we should have some success there!

I am beyond excited about young Felix and hope he can win his Futures tourney today. Denis withdrew from his SF because of illness, not injury, so hopefully he can play the upcoming Challenger event. I get to have a special treat if he wins the Challenger, so will be rooting for him extra hard. 🙂

And of course Vasek is still in the doubles as well as singles, after he and Steve Johnson won their 1R match.

Doubles News: The fans at IW are so lucky to see lots of doubles.

Kyrgios/Zimonjic upset the Bryans. Herbert/Mahut, the top seeds, won over Isner/Sock.

I was sad to see Nestor/ERV lose to Jamie Murray/Soares, who won last week in Acapulco. Perhaps they can make it 2 titles in a row. And Delpo/Paes defeated Muller/Querrey.

Scoop, you are correct about Muller/Querrey winning over Delpo/Paes. I obviously misread that, wishful thinking perhaps!

Scoop-

I can sense your conspiracy theories on the march again – believe me ‘shock upsets’ have been part of tennis since the first game of Sphairistiki played at Nantclwyd in December 1873 🙂

My last comment on Pospisil until after his next match, I promise! Even with this win Vasek just moves to No. 118 in live tennis rankings. If he wins his match over Dusan Lajovic of Serbia he will move closer to the top 100 but still won’t crack it. Lajovic had his own terrific upset win. Ranked No. 160, he defeated the 30th seed, Feli Lopez, in straight sets.

An odd statistic – Pospisil is the first Canadian player to defeat a No. 1 since Daniel Nestor won over Stefan Edberg at Davis Cup. I think it was 1992; it is hard to remember Danny ever being that young!

Correction: Lajovic is ranked No. 106. He came through qualies at IW.

By the way this also shows the weakness of the generation just below the big four, five. As solid as Raonic is, the reason he has no slam in hand is because he isn’t better than those who have them. He truly isn’t Sampras, a freak of nature who wrestled his first slam away from tour leadership in 1990 before struggling and then turning himself into a slam machine.

The reason Nishikori doesn’t have one is also he isn’t good enough to have one.

But now the slam champs are all older and make more errors whether on or off the court. There is more opportunity or at least the illusion of more opportunity and that may be enough to break through the bear hug of the big four for good and send all four of them kicking and screaming into retirement.

I think as Scoop has implied the big four want to keep the party going, even expanding to allow a fifth, Wawrinka, into the big four club as a capable substitute. And they relish every single time they shake hands as the victorious just escaped hell winners against Sascha Zverev and friends. And they are also shocked they can still pull these stunts off.

So it’s really Sacha Zverev and friends fault, or Raonic’s fault, or Nishikori’s fault for not hunting the big four into extinction. Too deferential as a pack, at least when it comes to Nishikori and Raonic and Dimitrov etc. But if they have their eyes open they should get that the big four have some measure of doubt that they can keep the lid on these days, and they should all call the bluff and beat them day in, day out. No daylight.

And the reason this wont happen is because they don’t think they can.

Cary Leeds Center?

Philipp Kohkschreiber just reached 400 match wins with his win against Dolgopolov (by retirement). Imagine Kohli would have preferred to get the win another way, but it is still a milestone. He joked that he achieved this because he is so old.