AO Remarkable Events

            As if a Djokovic loss to Istomin wasn’t enough, we had more surprises:

Mischa Zverev beats Murray.  What is it, sibling rivalry?  Mischa Zverev, who has had a journeyman career as a singles player, has improved his results substantially over the past few months.  Perhaps he’s trying to keep up with his younger brother Sasha.  Sasha Zverev, age 19, has risen rapidly in the ranks over the past year and appears headed for superstardom.  Suddenly, though, older brother Mischa seems to want to keep pace with Sasha.  Mischa played only challenger and future events between 2012 and 2015, but since then has been improving, and came into this Australian Open ranked 50 in the world.  He put an exclamation point on his improvement yesterday by knocking #1 Andy Murray out of the AO in four sets.  Murray seemed unable to cope with Zverev’s style, a lefty who likes to come forward.  Novak will be relieved, because if Murray had won this tournament, the rankings gap between himself and Andy would have widened substantially.   Now he remains in touch with Andy, but Novak has a lot of ranking points to defend over the next few months.

In another remarkable performance, Roger Federer beat Kei Nishikori in 5 sets.  When is Roger going to cease to amaze?  He came into this match with very little match play over the last 6 months, recovering from a knee injury, and with 35 years of hard tennis yards on him.  Nishikori, one of the world’s very best, came in match tough and playing great tennis.  Still, Roger was able to do it. 

This was a match where Roger moved amazingly well for his age and absence from play, and simply hit the ball too hard for Kei.  He also got many free points on his serve, which helped lessen the physical punishment.  The third set was won by Federer in only 26 minutes.  Roger played one loose service game in the 4^th set and lost it, but in the 5^th he quickly broke and seemed in command the rest of the way.  Nishikori took a time out for treatment of a back ailment, but appeared to move well after treatment.  I believe the time out had a little gamesmanship behind it.  I don’t think Nishikori was trying to “freeze out” Federer, but he may have been trying to buy a little time to collect his thoughts and figure out how to turn things around.  It is true that Nishikori has had a nagging back problem for years.  He was totally dominating Nadal in Madrid in 2014 before the back problem crippled him.  So the issues here might have been entirely medical and not at all psychological.

So now Federer plays Zverev.  Zverev will be fresh and has nothing to lose, but it’s hard to think of a tougher player to deal with than Federer, whose game is so diverse, and who has so much experience in big match settings.  We’ll see.