Legends of Sri Lanka
 

For a little over a year now in real-life time, I have been playing an online tennis manager game known as Rocking Racquets. When I began, I decided to take a unique approach and try to raise the tiny country of Sri Lanka, then at dead-last in the world(86th) in the rankings, as high as I could. The more traditional way of playing is raising the best young players of any nation that you can find, but this is somewhat of a lottery. It's really a matter of luck and timing, as you have to find them and hire them before anyone else can right after they are generated. The story of my Sri Lankan players has reached a historically important point, and so I have chosen today to begin this story.

Once I get the history out of the way it will be a slow-burning tale. The game world I am involved in is the slowest, as I did not wish for this to become a huge time sink but I love tennis and it gave me an outlet for that. 1 week per game day, which means almost two real-life months per year. The ultimate goal is to get Sri Lanka to #1 in the world, winning or doing as well as is possible in the World Team Cup(based loosely on the real-life Davis Cup). Individual achievements for my players are secondary.

Tour History

The game world I'm involved in is now in the final stages of Year 47. It actually began in Year 0, not Year 1. Generally truly modern tennis is dated from 1990, you can pick other dates but improvements in the rankings, standardization of various procedures, etc. demonstrate IMO that to be the best date. I like to think of this game world as having Year 0 = 1990, so that we are now at the end of the year 2037.

Top Players

There are really four players who, in this nearly half a decade of history, have truly distinguished themselves. All have won double-digit Slams, nobody else has won more than 7. As a quick-and-dirty comparison, that works well to identify the best.

4. Oliver Haresign(USA). Haresign flourished from 2022-2029, winning 11 Slams(4th) and two tour finals(T-5th). He is not nearly as accomplished as the three above him on this list, but far better than anyone not on it. In 2026 he won the first three Slams and lost in the final at the USO, nearly sweeping the season. Countryman Jason Coxetter, himself a fine player and ranking third at the time, stopped him in straight sets. Haresign has 23 Masters titles(also 4th all-time) though he did not do much at smaller events.

3. Nicholas Sullivan(IRE). This is the one controversial spot on the list. Sullivan's 17 Slams place him second all-time, prompting some to think he should be up a spot. There are good reasons to place him here though as shall be seen. No question he was a great, great player though. Sullivan was making appearances in the second week of Slams from 2016-2026, an impressive period of longevity. He came even closer than Haresign to the CYGS but did not quite make it in 2019. After dropping the Australian final in four sets, to Carl Hamilton, the longtime #2 during his reign and also from Ireland, Sullivan swept the remaining three Slams and the tour finals, taking the last four Masters titles for good measure. He is second in all-time Masters with 32, but like Haresign did not do much at the smaller events.

2. Martin Prieto(ESP). In the early years of the tour, there was Prieto and then there was everyone else. He also was a force for an 11-year period, 1995-2005. For decades it looked as if nobody would touch him. Twice he had three Slams, the tour finals, and a semifinal Slam loss as the only blemish on the big events. Overall he took home 16 Slams, one fewer than Sullivan. 30 Masters also ranks him third, just behind the Irishman, but Martin's 36 titles in 500 events put him over the top in my estimation, along with his 5 tour finals which is also second-best. No other player has won more than half that many. You can make an argument either way, but I place Prieto here.

1. Eric Gorritepe(ESP). Gorritepe knows no rival, contemporary or historic. He combines the durability and competitiveness of a Davydenko or Nadal with the skill of a Federer, the best of all possible combinations. His reign of terror only recently abated: currently ranked #6 in the world, it was only this last year that he ceased being a major threat at every event. This has allowed us to finally put his career in it's proper perspective. 2027-2037 looks like his era spread, with the last great ride being a final at the Australian just this past season. While nobody before him actually achieved the CYGS, he did it four times('29, '30, '32, and '33) and came one match short at the '31 Wimbledon. American Johnny Napier beat him in a five-set classic, coming from down 2-1 to provide the only major blemish in a five-year run the likes of which tennis has never seen before and will likely never see again. On both sides of that loss, Gorritepe won 10 straight Slams and won all five tour finals in those years as well. The final numbers for his unmatched career:

Slams: 23(1st, six more than Sullivan)
Tour Finals: 6(1st, one more than Prieto)
Masters: 52(1st, 20!! more than Sullivan)
500: 18(2nd, though only half of Prieto's number)

Present-Day Top Ten

1. Gabriel Alastra(ARG, 28) -- 10,060 pts.
It remains to be seen where Alastra will end up. He won three of his five slams last year, usurping Gorritepe at that time who was still his top challenger at age 31. This year he only won one, but did enough to stay just ahead of the competition.

2. David Almagro(ESP, 27) -- 9,960
Almagro won both of his Slam titles this year, emerging as a genuine threat to the #1 ranking.

3. David Prieto(ESP, 27) -- 9,580
His initial Slam win came at this year's Australian. Prieto is the third of a trio of players who can legitimately go into any tournament with the expectation of winning, providing a lot of drama and jockeying for position at the top of the rankings right now.

4. Oliver Challenger(USA, 28) -- 7,670
Challenger is good, just not quite as good as the Big Three.

5. Mick Elder(USA, 26) -- 7,580
Still improving, Elder has designs on challening the Big Three in '38.

6. Eric Gorritepe(ESP, 32) -- 5,750
The man who needs no introduction.

7. Spasoje Kucerovic(SRB, 27) -- 5,295

8. Perry Hogue(USA, 23) -- 4,925
The best of the next generation. The wise champion will watch out for him the next couple of years. His time is coming soon.

9. Bjorn Benda(DEU, 23) -- 4,450
A clay-court specialist who should have a lot more longevity than Hogue.

10. Jens Oberg(SWE, 23) -- 4,160

As can be seen in the bottom three here, the next wave of the youth movement is about to be served. Two years from now, Hogue/Benda/Oberg might well be forming their own 'Big Three'. Three more young names to watch are Antonin Iglar, Andrea Pirlo, and John Condon. All are in the Top 50 and have not yet reached their 22nd birthday.

Sri Lanka Tennis History

Sri Lanka stands alone in it's ineptitude, hence the reason for me selecting them as my nation to experiment with. For 10 years, from 1998-2007, they participated in Level 5 of the World Team Cup, the lowest level in the competition. Mostly they lost in the group stage, but four times they made it to the quarterfinals, including 2007. Each time they lost 3-2, one match short of the semis. All of the semifinalists qualify for a playoff to reach the next level up, so being one match short of that four times and never making it was particularly heartbreaking.

In 2008, due to a lack of interest from some of the world's most irrelevant tennis nations, Level 5 was disbanded. Admission to Level 4 for inactive teams was now based on the ranking of their top players as well as the nations' achievement history. For 30 years, Sri Lanka was never once invited.

Eight years ago in 2039, I entered the game with the goal of training up Sri Lanka's best. The first major goal was obviously to get back in the World Team Cup, and this last year I finally achieved it.


Current Players

I dropped a couple of players over the first couple years, but the following 'stable' of four players has been with me for at least four and some longer.

Anil Manohar -- At 35 years old, he's the elder statesman of the group. Manohar developed above-average skills, but was never more than average athletically even during his peak and is presently ranked 442nd. He had a career high of 238th a few years ago, but never made it beyond the level of a high futures/low challenger level player. Semi-pro, if you will. He was chosen as the player I could most quickly get to be a decent trainer. A dedicated trainer can improve a younger one a little faster than generic practice matches can, and the cutoff is age 40. Manohar has a few years yet left to increase his skills(the more skilled, the better a trainer he will become) and then he'll be 'put out to pasture' for use in his true value.

Anil Mehul -- A little short of age 22, Mehul is my top player, ranked 80th in the world. He hung around the edge of the Top 100 for a couple years, but has multiple Top 50 wins this year and is moving up again. He'll probably make the Top 30 eventually but I don't know if he'll go any higher than that. The lack of a trainer and some relatively minor mistakes I've made in training didn't help of course, but he has the talent and dedication. Athletically he's pretty good but not great, there are more gifted players out there but not that many.

Amrik Chittoor -- I was fortunate to snag Chittoor about a year after Mehul was created. He's not much of an athlete but every bit Mehul's equal other than that in talent and commitment. He's nearly 21 now, and has just cracked the Top 100 at #99.

Girish Girsh -- Girsh, 18, is just finishing up the best junior career I've ever had a player have. He'll be in Mehul's class eventually, or at least close to it. He's 7th in juniors with 10 titles at that level, and will be making the jump to pro tour next year.

All of this leads up to present events. With both Mehul and Chittoor placing in the Top 200 at the start of the year, Sri Lanka was admitted back into the World Team Cup. After 7 years of working up to it, the first major goal was achieved! The pair served as #1 and #2 singles respectively, with Mehul teaming alongside veteran Prakash Nilima in doubles. They smashed their way through the group stage with a mark of 13-2 in matches, 42-8 in sets, best of any Level 4 competitor!

The quarterfinals, bane of Sri Lanka four times in the past, were no different. Ecuador fell 4-1, then Lithuania in the semifinals and Egypt in the final by the same count. Nobody at this bottom level could compete with the two high-powered rising stars. Most of the matches lost were in the doubles.

This week, the 51st week of 2037, Sri Lanka is drawn against Lithuania again. Pairings are based on overall world rankings, and in this case it is their loss. Sri Lanka has risen from 86th to 69th with the successes this year but is still the lowest-ranked team in the playoff, while Lithuania at 31st is the highest-ranked. I have high confidence that we will stomp them again, allowing us to move up for the 2038 season.

Awesome.

Looking forward to following this. Very interesting premise.

Excellent!

Another bit of history was made. As expected, Sri Lanka dominated Lithuania for a second time, winning 4-1 again to move up to Level 3 for the 2038 season. Anil Mehul dropped only a single game in his two matchs(combined), Chittoor five in each of his but never came close to losing a set, while once again the doubles were a competitive loss.

Monday: A. Chittoor d. D. Gedgaudas, 6-3, 6-2, 6-0
Tuesday: A. Mehul d. J. Smimov, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0
Wednesday: J. Smimov/D. Gedgaudas d. A. Mehul/P. Nilima, 4-6, 6-3, 7-5, 6-2
Thursday: A. Mehul d. D. Gedgaudas, 6-0, 6-0, 6-1
Friday: A. Chittoor d. J. Smimov, 6-2, 6-2, 6-1

An impressive six bagel sets. This was never a contest. Sri Lanka is now up two spots to 67th in the world. We are now in the final week of 2037. Next week the first group matches get under way for the new year.

Each tier or level consists of 16 nations, divided into 4 groups. A round-robin schedule has a tie contested with each of the other three nations in a group, after which the top two nations from each group advance to the quarterfinals. As mentioned, making the semifinals ensures a spot in the playoff with a chance to move up to the next level/tier. As far as going into the playoffs having to win to stay up, I hadn't looked at that yet since it never concerned Sri Lanka before -- this is the first time we have competed at anything above the lowest level! It appears that the four lowest-ranking nations that don't make it out of the group stage are sent. Not the four lowest-ranking in the group performance, but in terms of their world ranking. So basically making it out of the group will ensure at least staying on the same level next year.

Sri Lanka has been drawn in Group 1 of Level 3. The opponents will be China(48th), Nigeria(39th), and Ukraine(47th). Ukraine has a veteran who was Top 50 until recently(Yevgeni Tupikov, 56th) so they will certainly not be as much of a pushover as most of last year's opponents. China should be very beatable, both of their singles players were in the 150 range. Nigeria made the L3 final last year, losing narrowly to India 3-2 in a playoff to move up. Their best player, Guillame Vittoz, is ranked 86th in the world at the moment and could give either one of our players problems.

I think Sri Lanka will make it out of Group 1 but it will not be a walk-over and a third-place finish is not out of the question. There will be a lot more tense moments this season in the World Team Cup.

The 2038 World Team Cup has begun!

We began facing off in a must-win against China, which as I mentioned is the weakest member of our group. Here's how the week unfolded:

Monday: A. Mehul d. W. Cheung, 6-1, 6-4, 6-3
Tuesday: A. Chittoor d. L. Chen, 7-6(4), 7-5, 6-2
Wednesday: Z. Hou/W. Cheung d. Mehul/Nilima, 1-6, 6-2, 6-4, 6-3
Thursday: A. Mehul d. L. Chen, 6-0, 6-2, 6-3
Friday: A. Chittoor d. W. Cheung, 7-6(10), 6-2, 6-4

Sri Lanka defeats China, 4-1!

The overall result was the same as most of our ties but it was much more competitive, particularly in Chittoor's matches. The first one against Chen was especially tense, but he pulled through. In the other tie, Nigeria blanked Ukraine 5-0. This was quite a surprise to me. Yevgeny Tupikov's decline must be steeper than I thought, he won just one set in his two matches combined. Nigeria now leads the group ahead of us on tiebreakers. After the Australian Open at the end of the month, we will face them in the second round of group play. That will be a vital tie, and the winner of it will essentially have booked their place in the quarterfinals.

The latest rankings have us up one spot to a new high of 66th.

2038 Australian Open

In doubles, Mehul and Chittoor won a pair of qualifying matches, then lost to 15-seeds Barros/Fue in the first round of the main draw. The final scoreline was 6-3, 6-7(7), 6-0.

This was Amrik Chittoor's first appearance in any Slam event. He played like it, losing to world no. 47 Vito Bonamoni(CHE) 6-2, 6-1, 6-0. Anil Mehul lost in the first round of every Slam last year except Wimbledon, where he made the third round. His first AO win came over world no. 51 Ruben Vega of Thailand, a competitive 6-3, 5-7, 6-3, 6-4 victory. Unfortunately he met up with American Mick Elder, the 5th-ranked player in the world, in the second round. Elder won the world tour finals last year and a pair of 250 events leading up to this. He's mentally better, has a better serve, and is physically more powerful than Mehul. There aren't many who Anil is outclassed again but this was one of those opponents. The match was barely competitive, 6-1, 6-2, 6-4.

Attention now turns to the pivotal WTC tie against Nigeria, coming up in a couple more weeks. Coming up next week will be Girish Girsh's first professional tournament, an amateur-level event in Singapore.

Amateurs

First up, a word about these events. They are a lot different than anything else a player sees in their ascent through the game. The amateur tournament class is a bridge of sorts between juniors and the semi-pro levels(futures and challengers). Most of the players here stink and will never amount to anything. Those who are even decent don't play here very long at all: the Top 1000 are barred from participating. Rankings and seedings don't really matter much or tell you anything.

Girish Girish had his first amateur event last week and ran through it quickly. He did not come close to losing a set, dropping no more than six games in any match. 6 points is his reward for this, moving him up from unranked to #1838. He'll need to play at least three more of these, spending several weeks training in between them.


2038 World Team Cup: Third Level Round Robin Stage, Second Tie

Sri Lanka faced Nigeria with the winner all but assured a place in the quarterfinals. This was the most dangerous matchup for us.

Monday: A. Mehul d. Y. Bozza, 6-2, 6-1, 6-3

** The easiest singles match for us, so it wasn't really a surprise.

Tuesday: G. Vittoz d. A. Chittoor, 4-6, 6-1, 6-3, 4-6, 6-3

** This was the most epic match any of my players have been involved in, the first one to go five sets for sure and a back-and-forth struggle. Vittoz was better(156-135 total points in the match) but also more inconsistent and Chittoor pushed him to five before suffering the first WTC singles loss Sri Lanka has endured in my tenure. This was a moment of concern because it was feasible though unlikely either player could lose their second singles rubber, and if we lost the doubles like we always do we would drop the tie if they didn't both win.

Wednesday: A. Mehul/P. Nilima d. T. Labbe/B. Dia, 6-3, 6-1, 6-1

** Or they could just annihilate the Nigerian doubles representatives. That works too. This made it all but certain Sri Lanka would prevail. It was shocking though -- I still have a hard time believing they pulled this off.

Thursday: A. Mehul d. G. Vittoz, 7-6(5), 6-3, 6-2

** A nice straight-sets win after the first-set escape, and we clinch the tie!

Friday: A. Chittoor d. Y. Bozza, 6-1, 6-0, 6-0

** Bozza obviously wasn't motivated in the dead rubber here.

Group 1 Results

Just as surprising as the ease of our win over Nigeria was the fact that China blanked Ukraine 5-0 without the loss of a set! This leaves Sri Lanka with a 100% clinched spot in the quarterfinals and first place in Group 1! Nigeria will face China in the final round robin round, and the winner will be tied with us but Sri Lanka will hold the head-to-head tiebreaker. The loser will have only one win while we have two, even if we lose to winless Ukraine which seems highly unlikely.

The next round is a couple of months away after the hard-court masters in Indian Wells and Miami. Mehul and Chittoor will participate in those events, maybe a challenger for each if needed before then. and Girsh will played another amateur event as well.

A couple notes that happened before this week's event first. Anil Manohar, who has all he can do to stay in the Top 500 these days, made the final at an F2(Tier 2 Futures) event in Lithuania, while Amrik Chittoor lost in the QF at a CH2(Tier 2 Challenger) tournament to Perry Mockler(USA, 88th).

This week, while the Masters was going on, Girish Girsh was in his second amateur tournament which ended up not faring as well. He was the 14-seed this time, and waltzed through to the semifinals where he met up with American Joseph Skirrow, an 18-year-old at basically the same point in his career. Skirrow defeated him there in a competitive three-setter, 3-6, 7-6(4), 6-3.

2038 Indian Wells Masters

This was the debut in terms of Masters events for Amrik Chittoor, while Anil Mehul played here last year, losing in the first round. Chittoor played his way through three rounds of qualifying successfully, only to be defeated in the first round of the main draw by 82nd-ranked Slovakian Cestmir Dsiadosz, 6-3, 7-6(3).

Mehul fared better this year. He not only won his first Masters match, but handed out a bagel in doing so. In the second round, Loke Borrman(SWE, 27th) was one of the biggest scalps he's ever taken in a 6-4, 6-4 win. Next up was Spasoje Kucerovic of Serbia, the 7th-ranked player in the world. Anil has been winning more and more against players outside of the Top 20 and gradually sliding up the rankings to 69th going into this week, but against the very best of the Top 10 he's still winless. Kucerovic has a better serve and is much stronger physically, though he's not particularly adept at hard-court play. After a dominant first set by the Serbian it was a tough battle the rest of the way with the favorite eventually triumphing 6-1, 7-6(4), 6-7(6). 8-6 in a final-set tiebreak is about as close as you can come to winning without actually doing it. It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Anil Mehul get a Top 10 victory before the year is out the way he's been going.

After a week off, Mehul and Chittoor will head to Miami for the second of early US Masters events.

2038 Miami Masters

For Amrik Chittoor it was a repeat of Indian Wells. A good run through qualifying, then a quick beatdown in the first round of the main draw. Argentinian veteran Patrick Rafter surrendered just four games.
It was similar for Mehul as well. New Zealand's Arsenio Antuofermo(world no. 37) was beaten 6-3, 6-4 in the first. That brought up a matchup with a beatable seed, another fairly kind draw.

Tihomir Hreglic(CRO, 21st) was the obstacle. Hreglic is not quite as good from the baseline as Mehul nor as comfortable on the hard courts, but he has a much better serve and is a very mentally tough player, always doing his best in the key moments. Anil gave it a run but Tihomir prevailed 6-7(4), 6-4, 6-2. The Croatian saved all three break points he faced and his first serve was impregnable(14 aces, 67% won). If he hadn't been having a great day in terms of accuracy -- he only missed 12 of his first serves, 12% of the total -- Mehul would have had a real chance to pull off the upset.

The final round of group play in the WTC is a bit anticlimactic for Sri Lanka. That's coming up next week, and we'll find out who we face in the quarterfinals.

Long-range Outlook

Anil Mehul turned 22 the first week of the Miami Masters, which seemed a good time to take a look at how his career is progressing. He's been moving steadily upwards this year, these last couple weeks playing at the level of probably a Top 30 player though his ranking is still in the 60s. There are only five players ranked ahead of him who are shy of their 21st birthday, an indicator that many bigger things are ahead of him.

Amrik Chittoor's days in my stable of players are numbered. He's not as good of an athlete, though skill wise he's not far behind Mehul and a year younger. I don't think he has the ability to rise too much further than he has, and I'll be surprised if he ever cracks the Top 50.

Girish Girsh is the future. He's very similar in talent to Mehul, not quite as dedicated, a little more mentally tough, physically very similar though probably a shade behind. Girsh is a little ahead of the pace though in developing his skills and it's not out of the question that he'll become the best player of the group. In a year or two, Chittoor will be jettisoned in favor of a new junior player and Girsh will eventually take his place on the national WTC team. It's a question of when, not if.

Rankings Update

Before I get to the WTC, the first quarter of 2038 is in the books now and here's what's changed at the top of the sport.

1. David Almagro(ESP) -- 10,520

Overtook Alastra with a runner-up finish at the AO and hasn't given up the top ranking since. He won a 500 event in Rotterdam and went out in the semis at Indian Wells and Miami, good enough to maintain his #1 status but not good enough to open a gap on the field.

2. Gabriel Alastra(ARG) -- 9,770

A shocking quarterfinal exit at the AO to Jens Oberg dropped him to third, and his results since were underwhelming until a runner-up finish last week in Miami.

3. David Prieto(ESP) -- 9,640

Prieto has been the best player so far this year, champion at the AO and Miami, with a couple of 250 titles to go with it. He hasn't added all that much to last year's results though, largely due to an early fourth-round exit in Indian Wells.

4. Mick Elder(USA) -- 8,670

Elder is making good on his goal of challenging the Big Three, already having added more than a thousand points to his total and nearing striking distance. It didn't help that he lost early at the AO(4th round) but he's got three smaller titles to his credit(Brisbane, Auckland, and Memphis). He also won at Indian Wells and made the semis in Miami. Last year's clay results were pretty good, so he'll be hard pressed to improve too much on them.

5. Oliver Challenger(USA) -- 6,960

A casualty of Elder's rise to make the Big Three now the Big Four or at least about to be, Challenger is down to 5th and no longer the top US player.

6. Bjorn Benda(DEU) -- 5,370

Up from 9th and about 900 points added, Benda continues to be the top hope of the next generation. The future for him is very, very soon after a run to the IW finals.

7. Spasoje Kucerovic(SRB) -- 5,040

8. Jens Oberg(SWE) -- 4,695

A signature upset over Alastra at the AO was impressive -- it's not often that a 23-year-old knocks off the reigning king at a Slam event. Like Benda, Oberg is on the rise and he's several months younger. He's up two spots from 8th over the first quarter.

9. Perry Hogue(USA) -- 4,685

At the beginning of the year I called him 'the best of the next generation'. He didn't make any progress though, so maybe I was wrong. Is he a flash in the pan that has peaked already? He's been consistent, but hasn't been able to break through by getting past the semis in any of the big events. I'd say the jury's still out here.

10. Eric Gorritepe(ESP) -- 4,360

How the mighty have fallen. It would appear the unquestioned GOAT has reached the point of irrelevance this year. It happens to everyone eventually, and he's closer to 33 now than 32, no longer a major threat on the biggest stages.

As for my Sri Lankan quartet, here's their progression:

** Anil Mehul -- 73rd to 62nd singles, 206th to 192nd doubles. He continues to move up steadily. Already Mehul is the only Top 200 doubles player the nation has ever had, and the singles mark, set over 30 years ago at world no. 58 by Prakash Manohari, looks like it will go soon.

** Amrik Chittoor -- 93rd to 92nd singles, 1113th to 850th doubles. Chittoor is pretty much stuck where he is, and I don't expect huge strides upwards anytime soon. For a player of his subpar athleticism to reach the Top 100 is really pretty good.

** Anil Manohar -- 436th to 490th singles, 659th to 712th doubles. It's hit and miss whether Manohar makes it to the business end of even mid-level futures tournaments now. He's in full trainer preparation mode now.

** Girish Girsh -- Unranked at the start of the year as he'd just finished a 7th-place finish among juniors, Girsh is 1571st in singles, 3335th in doubles.


2038 WTC Group Play, Round 3, Level 3
Sri Lanka vs. Ukraine

It was an anticlimactic tie as Sri Lanka was already going to make the quarterfinals, but was important for getting a relatively favorable draw and of course continuing to move up the rankings.

Monday: A. Chittoor d. Y. Tupikov, 6-3, 6-3, 6-1
Tuesday: A. Mehul d. I. Piaskovsky, 6-1, 6-0, 6-0
Wednesday: Mehul/Nilima d. Preobrazhensky/Chichelnitsky, 6-1, 6-2, 6-0
Thursday: A. Mehul d. Y. Tupikov, 6-1, 6-0, 6-1
Friday: A. Chittoor d. I. Piaskovsky, 6-1, 6-1, 6-1

Yawn. I expected us to win, but I didn't expect this kind of crushing. Nowhere did we come close to losing a set, four bagels and eight breadsticks served up!

Sri Lanka advances to the knockout stage every bit as convincingly as we did last year in Level 4. I thought it would be a bit more difficult this year. Our opponent in the vital quarterfinals has been drawn as Canada. I don't expect them to be able to offer major resistance. There are two other nations that could be tough: Austria, who we could face in the semis, and Poland who is on the other side of the bracket and we wouldn't see until the finals. Assuming we get by Canada, we'll have the chance to be in the playoffs for another promotion at the end of the year.

After the strong undefeated run through group play Sri Lanka has risen to a new high of 55th in the rankings. Upward and onwards! The WTC takes a break now, as the quarterfinals don't come up until after the USO in the fall. It will be a relatively quiet period for the next several weeks. Girsh will be looking to get a couple more amateur wins, while Chittoor and Mehul will be playing only as much as needed to stay sharp. Challengers in Chittoor's case, it's possible Mehul may enter a 250 but clay is not our forte and with the masters events limited to a field of 56 it'd be a reach to have either of them enter those. The next big event is of course Roland Garros coming up in a little under two months time. The daily grind of training will cover most of this period for my contingent of players.

I'll follow along!

Good start!

Tell

Danke muy mucho. The clay season is now mostly in the books.

Anil Mehul played in his first 250 event in Bucharest. His first-round opponent was Chilean veteran Florentino Grasa, now 32 years old but he was once a Top 10 player. At this point in their respective careers, Mehul would be a modest favorite anywhere but clay. On this surface the odds were flipped. Grasa's serve is still a little better, the only significant skill advantadge he has, and that proved the difference. He converted half his break chances, while Mehul had a few more of them but only won 5 of 17 in a tough loss. The final score was 6-7(5), 7-5, 7-6(2), three tough, tight sets and only five total points separating the players.

After a week off, a final tuneup event at a large Challenger in Bordeaux was next. Unfortunately, Mehul ran into Grasa there as well in the quarterfinals after a couple of testy early-round wins against lower-ranking clay specialists. Again he pushed through to a deciding tiebreaker, but again he lost, 4-6, 7-5, 7-6(3).

Amrik Chittoor played only one event in the lead-up, a small Challenger event in Ostrava. He was pushed but won in a couple of straight-sets wins, then fell to American Radek Smitala(100th) in the quarters.

Girish Girsh continued his assault on the amateurs by cruising to the title in Bergamo, Italy. He never lost more than five games in a match or three in a set.


2038 French Open

All of that work led up to the year's second Slam tournament. Chittoor made his debut here as well. He had a pretty unkind draw, facing off with 14-seed Issac Malpica(ESP). It was over quickly: 6-2, 6-0, 6-1. Yuck. In doubles, the pair managed to reach the final round of qualifying before losing, a bit better than in Australia and the hardcourt masters but still not enough to get to the main draw.

Mehul, on the other hand, had good fortune in his first-round opponent. Last year he'd taken just three games off of Mick Elder, but this time it was aging local wild card Samuel Michon(257th). Mehul completely dominated the match, handing out a bagel and a pair of breadsticks for his first career win at Roland Garros. The next obstacle was far more substantial: 13-seed Evgeni Topoloski(RUS). Topoloski mainly had the advantage of a better serve and greater skill on clay. After a good fight, Mehul succumbed 6-4, 7-5, 6-4. He played well enough to take at least a set but eight double faults really hurt. The Russian was able to get just enough easy points on his serve to keep Anil at bay.

Three of the players will be in action in smaller events next week while the titans of the tour battle it out in the second week of the FO. Challenger events are in store for Mehul and Chittoor, while Girsh enters what will hopefully be his final amateur event -- but only if he wins again. A month from now Wimbledon will be upon us, and I'll report back in then. Mehul will continue to work on his clay game as there is a historic opportunity upcoming after that. In August, the summer Olympics beckon in Belgium. No Sri Lankan has ever attempted to qualify for the field of 64 there. Mehul will probably have to go through the qualifying draw to make it, but the chance to represent our nation in the Olympics is definitely worth it. Until then, getting every possible edge on the dirt is his top priority.

2038 Wimbledon

Amrik Chittoor first faced off against Pamel Bestiavanov(RUS, 108th), roughly same age and skills. Bestianov is a little more gifted physically and more familiar with grass-court tennis. A tight match, but Chittoor failed to break through and get his first Slam win, losing 7-6(5), 6-3, 6-7(1), 7-5. This was about as good a chance as Chittoor is likely to get to win a match, it's pretty clear he just isn't quite good enough at this point.

Anil Mehul had a good draw against Arvid Hjoch(SWE, 59th). Could have been better but also could have been a good deal worse. On paper it looked like a very even match, little to choose between them. Mehul has the better baseline game and more grass familiarity, a surface that Hjoch basically completely ignores: the Swede is the better server as always seems to be the case and a hair faster around the court. It was an epic match and could have gone either way. In the end, Mehul prevailed in his first five-setter, 6-3, 3-6, 7-6(7), 3-6, 10-8!! Only one point separated them, 178-177 in total. On this day, Mehul was a little better on the big points especially the break chances, and that was the(very narrow) difference.

In the second round, 11-seed Viktor Goncharenko of Russia waited. In this case the athletic gap between the players was simply too much to overcome. Goncharenko cruised to a comprehensive 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 stroll of a win. The loss hurt Mehul a bit in the rankings as he made it to the third round last year, but it is a third straight second-round showing at the Slams which is a pretty good indicator of where he is right now. Last year he caught a really low seed in the first round, which is the kind of fortuitious draw it would take to have a real chance of getting further. He's still getting better though, and that should continue for a few more years so it's still uncertain what his ceiling is.

Rankings Update

A little over halfway through the year now. Here's how the picture has changed in the last few months:

Anil Mehul -- 62nd to 67th singles, 192nd to 182nd doubles. Basically stagnant overall, but the clay season will never be much of a strong point for him. Whether or not he moves up much this year will be determined by the North American hardcourt swing coming up in a few weeks.

Amrik Chittoor -- 92nd to 83rd singles, 850th to 549th doubles. Continues to move up steadily. I think the gap between the two here is greater than the rankings show.

Anil Manohar -- 490th to 534th singles, 712th to 1034th doubles. Continuing to fall off the cliff, even the better futures events are now beyond
him. Right now Manohar is working on his doubles game in view of becoming a well-rounded trainer in a few years time.

Girish Girsh -- 1571st to 958th singles, 3335th to 2434th doubles. Girish will take his first plunge into low-level futures play in a couple of weeks. I fully expect him to catch Manohar in the rankings by the end of the year.

Top Ten

1. Gabriel Alastra(28, ARG) -- 10,280

Alastra won Wimbledon for his sixth Grand Slam title, making him 10th all time in that category.

2. David Prieto(27, ESP) -- 9,990

A four-set loss to Alastra at Wimbledon prevented him from taking the top spot. Nonetheless, these two have separated themselves a bit from the other challengers recently.

3. Mick Elder(27, USA) -- 8,710

4. David Prieto(27, ESP) -- 8,530

5. Bjorn Benda(24, DEU) -- 7,100

Benda, a clay specialist, broke through with a win at the French Open for his first Slam crown. This cements his place of the most accomplished player of the 'next generation'.

6. Oliver Challenger(28, USA) -- 6,300

7. Jens Oberg(23, SWE) -- 4,470

8. Eric Gorritepe(32, ESP) -- 4,450

Up a couple spots in the last few months, he refuses to go away completely.

9. Perry Hogue(24, USA) -- 4,270

10. Spasoje Kucerovic(27, SRB) -- 4,070

There's a big gap between 6th-7th and also between 10th and 11th. This could very well be the same group of ten players straight through the end of the year. After a semifinal run at Wimbledon, 24-year-old Evgeni Topolski of Russia looks like the only player capable of crashing the party.

Next up is the Olympics in Belgium in a few weeks, and then after that in short succession will come the hard-court masters in Canada and Cincinatti, followed almost immediately by the US Open.

The week before the Olympic event, Girish Girsh played in his first futures event(third tier). It was on hardcourt in China, and he benefited from the fact that it was a busy week schedule-wise in garnering the fourth seed. Girsh faced only wild cards and qualifiers en route to the final, stomping all of them with ease. Once there, he faced Russian Felix Demidenko, and won a tighter match but still in straight sets, 6-3, 6-4 to claim the title! Girsh moved up to the low 700s in the rankings after this, and will probably move up to a second-tier futures in his next event.

The week prior to that, there had been an interesting situation as Mehul was entered into a big challenger event in Sopot, Poland. After a couple of wins against low-ranking players, he again met Swede Arvid Hjoch, the same player he had beaten in the epic five-setter in the first round at Wimbledon less than a month prior. Hjoch would normally be the favorite as an extreme clay-court specialist, and probably would have won had he not been mismanaged. In the second week of Wimbledon, just two weeks prior, he had played in and won another big challenger event, taking the crown in both singles and doubles. A job well done, but he needed more time off to play at his best. A player who over-commits will soon find themselves not just suffering in terms of performance but also not learning as much as they otherwhise would from the match. That's exactly what happened as Mehul upset him for the second time, 6-4, 6-4. Hjoch's manager, who goes by the handle of Karma -- I swear I didn't make that up -- is presently ranked 19th, while I am 30th and have pretty much stagnated there for the last several months. I was a little surprised that such a fairly high-ranking manager(there are 124 with a positive score, i.e. more points than you start with by default) made a mistake like this.

Irish veteran James Fenney fell in the semis, and Mehul came up just short of what would have been the biggest title of his career. World no. 36 Cestmir Marcek of Czechoslovakia ended that bid 4-6, 6-4, 7-5. A little disappointing, but it was still huge for Mehul to reach the final of a big clay challenger like this.

2038 Olympics

The day arrived, and history was made as Anil Mehul became the first Sri Lankan to ever participate in the tennis Olympics. In doubles he teamed with usual partner Prakash Nilima and lost a close match in the first round, but that was not unexpected. In singles, his first matchup wasn't a bad one at all, defeating American Pierce Gaskell fairly easily. Australian Arsenio Antuofermo was next, whom Mehul had beaten in a competitive first-rounder at the Miami Masters last spring. This one was tougher, but he eventually prevailed again 6-7(4), 7-5, 6-3 for a comeback win.

Suddenly he found himself in the last 16 of the tournament! This was much more than he had expected coming in, winning one match would have been a success. Croatian (11) Strahina Kecic raced through a quick first set and survived a tight tiebreak to end the fun there, 6-0, 7-6(6). As important and historic as this run was, it will also have far-reaching consequences in Mehul's career. He moved up to a Sri Lanka record 48th after the tournament, the first player ever to crack the Top 50. It also forced him into making a scheduling decision. Continuing to play singles and doubles consistently will put him in a situation like Hjoch where he is overplaying and getting suboptimal results. From the time he entered the tour as a junior, tournaments have primarily served the function of getting him match experience, with the scheduling focus on training to improve.

That will continue to happen, but at this point he has reached the elite of tennis and the most important factor now is results. Anil Mehul will be entering in all the big singles events from here on out throughout at least the rest of his prime, only playing doubles as warranted during 'slow' parts of the season. His next major goal is to reach the Top 30, a ranking which allows for being seeded in Slams and the larger Masters, with the bonus of avoiding the top players until much later in the tournament. Big things are ahead for him if these last couple of events are any proper indication.

I decided to combine both Masters events into one report, since they are back-to-back and there wasn't a whole lot else going on.

Canada Masters

First up for our hero was dynamic Argentinian qualifier Robert Garcia. After surviving a first-set tiebreak, it was a quick finish. Then awaited the greatest of them all, Eric Gorritepe. At this point in his career he's still more than Mehul's equal, probably the only player in the world that is better from the baselilne. A little surprisingly, Mehul saved 11 of 13 break points in scoring his first top ten win in a very tight struggle, 7-6(8), 7-6(7). It could have gone either way, and any time you beat the GOAT, even at 32, it's a huge feather to put in your cap. Topoloski was up next, and it was the same story: close, but not close enough. The Russian won it 6-4, 6-4, going on to win the tournament with only Mick Elder able to give him a tougher match. With the victory, his first masters title, Topoloski crashes the party now at #9 in the rankings.

With back-to-back showings in the round of 16 and the win over Gorritepe, Mehul is seriously starting to move up in the world.

Cincinatti Masters

31-year-old Arnaldo Barranco(PER, 29th) is the kind of player that has become almost routine, and while he slipped in the second set Mehul was clearly the better player and advanced in three to face world no. 3 Mick Elder for the second time. The last meeting was the French Open over a year ago, when Elder surrendered just three games in as many sets. Time to see how far he's come. It was closer this time, but the titans of the sport are beyond Mehul's grasp yet, and he lost in the second round here 6-3, 6-4. With probably the best serve in the game and a partisan crowd behind him, the result was virtually foregone for Elder but it was a competitive match at least. Total points were 66-56; Mehul belongs on the court with the top guys now, but still has work to do in order to catch them.

Our hero is set to go into the US Open around 40th in the world, still a little bit out of the seeded positions. After that, the WTC picks up again with Sri Lanka looking to extend their win streak and continue to move up in the pecking order.

I've jumped in (to Game World 2) and am working with a couple young'ns myself! We'll see if I can get the hang of this...

Cool, let me know if you have any questions. One piece of advice is that I would make sure you have one older player.

I jumped in with a 14yo and a 16yo. Have them in AMAs and JG4s currently, and getting a lot of practice in on clay.

I do have another world left to play in, where I can jigger up my set-up. Why specifically do you recommend an older guy?

If you want to get the most out of your younger players over the course of their career, you need a trainer. Why? Because you get more experience for matches with a trainer than you do from friendly matches. As a talented player develops, they eventually reach the point(when your endurance gets over 3 you will probably start to notice this) where even if you have them constantly playing in practice tournaments in between real events you still need to supplement that with friendly matches to keep them from wasting days(i.e., running out of fatigue which is always a bad thing because it means they lost training time and gained less experience than they could have).

Anil Mehul will not be as good as he could have been, because he's never had a trainer(Manohar is still a little over 4 game-years from being ready to hang 'em up and take on that role, and even then he'll be a good-not-great one). I've also screwed up maybe a dozen or so weeks over the course of his career and not entered him in events :(. But you know, you live and learn, and that's why I play in the slow time control.

Essentially this is what I recommend for starting out:

** Best 14-year-old you can find. Be prepared to fire them if you find a better one. New players join the pool every few game weeks on Monday.
** Best prime player(i.e. around 25) you can find with the rest of your available points. Their purpose is to gain you points so you can buy a better one.
** As soon as you have enough points, get the best prime player available. You won't be able to get a good one, but I think in my game world it was around 700 points or so that the best ones went for. You are looking for the player with the best potential as a trainer.
** Once you get that first trainer, you can train new young players better.

There's a certain 'build-up' involved and I'm not all the way there yet. But the bottom-line idea is this: you can't make a player the 'best they can be' until you have a top trainer, so getting the best trainer you can as soon as you can is IMO a key priority. Then you can use that trainer to better work on a next-gen player, giving them better skills and they will eventually become a better trainer than the first guy ... and so on until you've got a truly elite trainer going and then you just need to keep the system humming. That's why I hang on to Anil Manohar even though he's struggling to stay in the Top 500 and declining all the time. I need to max out his abilities for training so that the next young prodigy I bring up can benefit from his skills. When I do that(I think it's going to be at the end of 2039, or a little over a game year from now) I'll post something about the results, practice vs. training matches, to give an idea of how much of a difference it makes. All the top managers have top trainers(usually 5.0). There's a formula on the site for how the trainer ability is determined. Right now Manohar would be a 3.8 on the 5-point scale, I should be able to get him into the low 4s.

I probably should also point out here that while I'm sure you'll develop your own system for what events to enter players in when(I'm still working on mine), pay attention to their form(look at the documentation for where the penalties and bonuses kick in if you don't know) so that you aren't overplaying or underplaying them, and also keep in mind you get more experience from losing than winning. If you are winning the title at almost every event, you aren't playing the right ones(unless of course you are the #1 player in the world) :).

Y'all are wanting to hook me in.

Nah, I'd much rather read you swearing about your latest FM club :P

2038 US OPEN

The final Slam of the year arrived with the luck of the draw a paramount consideration. There are two kinds of players for whom it is particularly important, both represented here. At the lower end, Amrik Chittoor is among the lower-ranked players in the draw and, absent a favorable draw, has basically no real chance of advancing. On the other end of the scale, Anil Mehul is one of the best unseeded players and has the potential to win a few matches or go out immediately depending on who he gets. It's important to avoid the titans for as long as possible, as in last year's straight-set beatdown by Alastra in his opening match.

As it happened, the draw was fairly kind for both players this time, though it could also have been better in either case. Chittor was paired with Egon Bengtsson(FIN, 79th), a clay-court specialist who is more powerful but not adept at hard-court tennis and a player who has been known to choke away matches in the key moments. It's still unlikely he'll avoid another loss but there's a chance for a mild upset.

Mehul was set to face off against Pavel Bestemianov(RUS, 100th), a young player that he should slightly outclass across the board and who slightly overplayed coming into the event, so he won't quite be at his best. A win there, and he'd meet at worst the lowest seed in the tournament, Switzerland's Vito Bonamoni, against whom he'd also have good chances. The bad news was that if that went well, the gravy train was expected to end there with a third-round date against world No. 4 David Prieto of Spain.

First Round

Chittoor not only broke his perfect 0-3 Slam record come in, but he did in a grand style with a fairly shocking victory over Bengtsson, 6-3, 6-4, 6-4. I hadn't bothered to look further ahead in his section, but he'll next be a sacrifical lamb for 5-seed Oliver Challenger(USA). Mehul handed out a bagel to start and cruised through the next two sets for an easy straight-sets win, surrendering only five total games. A great start for both players.

Second Round

Chittoor was handed two breadsticks and a final-set bagel, winning only 38 of 124 points against Challenger. A predictable beat-down, but for him of course the event was made by advancing past the first round. The first set between Mehul and Bonamoni went down to the wire, with a break in the 10th game the only difference. Anil was able to put more and more pressure on his opponent's serve as the match went on, and scored a fairly tough 6-4, 6-3, 6-3 win to advance to the third round without the loss of a set. Unfortunately, Prieto is there as expected, and has surrendered just five games all tournament.

Third Round

The expected straight-set defeat happened, but Mehul took another step in giving Prieto some serious competition. The final line was 7-6(1), 6-2, 7-5, a very credible effort against the fourth-ranked player in the world. He's inching closer all the time.

Rankings Update -- 2038 3Q

The third quarter is in the books, and there have been some surprises in the last few months for my Sri Lankan quartet.

Anil Mehul -- 67th to 35th singles, 182nd to 294th doubles. He's obviously really turned the corner here in singles, and it's an interesting and open question whether Mehul will be seeded at the AO to begin 2039. A couple of Tier 1 Challenger titles from last year will come off the slate in the next couple of months, and it's possible but probably unlikely he'll be able to replace those points in the Shanghai and Paris Masters, the two big events left in the year that he'll be playing. More likely a no than a yes, but there's still a lot of tennis to be played and he might need to throw a 250 event or a big challenger in there to stay match-fresh ... we'll see. Either way, there's no question Mehul should be positioned for a serious assault against the best in the world next year.

Amrik Chittoor -- 83rd to 87th singles, 549th to 259th doubles. A nice rise in doubles but pretty much still hanging out in the journeyman ranks. Whether he can build on his USO win remains to be seen.

Anil Manohar -- 534th to 376th singles, 1034th to 1337th doubles. A surprising crown at a recent Tier 2 futures event reversed his gradual decline for the moment, but it's a temporary stay.

Girish Girsh -- 958th to 525th singles, 2434th to 2006th doubles. Since turning pro, Girsh has lost just the one amateur match. Just last week, during the second half of the US Open, he moved up to a Tier 2 futures and promptly ran the table there as well. A quarterfinal match proved testy as he didn't show up early, dropping four straight games and eventually the first set before rallying for a fairly easy win. In the final, he met top seed Jesper Fine of Norway, a good test as Fine is ranked 212th in the world. Girsh prevailed in a tough three-set match that could have gone either way. Beating a player like Fine means he is probably going to settle in as a big futures/small challenger kind of tweener player for a while once his ranking gets up there. Right now he's blazing a trail upwards, and will give one of the big futures events a shot next time out.


World Top Ten

1. Mick Elder(USA) -- 10,930

Elder took the top spot for the first time after a thrilling conclusion to the US Open saw him beat Prieto and then Benda, both matches going the full five sets.

2. Gabriel Alastra(ARG) -- 10,660

A semifinal loss to Benda at the USO lost him the top spot, but he's still a major threat anywhere.

3. David Almagro(ESP) -- 8,340

Almagro did not show up to defend his title, which cost him dearly. One wonders if his manager has for some reason gone MIA. It happens sometimes.

4. David Prieto(ESP) -- 8,140

5. Bjorn Benda(DEU) -- 7,880

The next generation is no longer a thing that's coming: it's here. Benda may well take over the #1 spot by early next year at the rate he's going. A semi-final win over Alastra proved he's got the game to win not just on the dirt but across multiple surfaces.

6. Oliver Challenger(USA) -- 5,335

7. Eric Gorritepe(ESP) -- 4,665

8. Perry Hogue(USA) -- 4,300

9. Evgeni Topolski(RUS) -- 4,135

The other top player in the same stable as Almagro, Topolski missed the USO as well and the top ten's newest member a chance to move up.

10. Spasoje Kucerovic(SRB) -- 3,670

Kucerovic's slot may change hands quite a bit. Oberg, Goncharenko, and rising Spaniard David Alvarez are all one big tournament from taking it. Oberg appears to have peaked early though and the other two probably aren't going to get all that much better than they are right now, so none of them are going to be the next big star of tennis or anything.

2038 WTC -- Level 3 Quarterfinals

The matchup with Canada figured to be another romp for Sri Lanka. Their best singles player, Joshua Tepest, is barely a Top 200 guy and i thought maybe at best he might be able to upset Chittoor, but we'd still get at least three wins minimum from the other singles matches. The one surprise was the selection of Chittoor/Nilima as the doubles team. Mehul is actually only the third-highest ranking doubles player -- barely, literally one spot below Nilima -- but for him to have more rest from match play to focus on his singles career is really a blessing at this point for him personally. Not so much for the nation but it's only a small handicap.

Monday: A. Mehul d. P. Baudoin, 6-2, 6-0, 6-1
Tuesday: A. Chittoor d. J. Tepest, 6-4, 6-1, 6-0
Wednesday: A. Chittoor/P. Nilima d. M. Foy/P. Baudoin, 6-3, 3-6, 3-6, 6-4, 6-3
Thursday: A. Mehul d. J. Tepest, 6-0, 6-1, 6-3
Friday: A. Chittoor d. P. Baudoin, 6-1, 6-0, 6-1

A 5-0 blanking as Sri Lanka moves on to the semifinals, confirming our place in the promotion playoffs at the end of the year! There was plenty of drama in the doubles match, which the Canadians lost via 19 double faults and only 8 of 25 BP converted more than we won it. The singles matches were all dominated. Sri Lanka is up another 5 spots to 50th in the world rankings.

Next up is Austria, who defeated Romania 4-1 for their part and is the top competition. On paper, they have a very similar lineup to ours. Everyone will need to be at their best. In order for that to happen, Mehul needs to get at least a couple more matches in, so he'll be in St. Petersburg for a 250-level event next week with the semis coming up the week after that. Everyone else has the week off for training.

Signed up for an account because of this dynasty!

That's a great compliment, and more than I expected. Thanks!

The story continues, with some pretty high drama ...

In St. Petersburg, Mehul did a little better than expected. He was seeded 8th, and blasted through the first two rounds, meeting 4-seed Falk Gries(DEU) in the quarters. Gries had overplayed badly coming in and while he pushed the second set to a tiebreak, he fell pretty meekly as well. The semis brought a rematch with Viktor Goncharenko, the top seed and world no. 12. He had beaten Anil in straight sets to end his Wimbledon bid in the second round. This time he was not quite as sharp, and the surface was more to Mehul's liking. It didn't really seem to matter though. The gap in athleticism led to a similar result ... or it least it appeared to be. Down 6-3, 4-1, Mehul just kept fighting and fighting. He made his way to a tiebreak, then trailed 3-0 and 5-2 there before rattling off the last five points to take the set and force a decisive third!

He had to fight harder than his higher-ranked opponent to hold, but he held his nerve and the decider remained on serve until the ninth game. Anil raced out to a 0-40 lead, missed the first two break chances but snagged the third to serve for the match. And that's when the wheels came off. He just couldn't finish, dropping the last three games for a heartbreaking 6-3, 6-7(5), 7-5 defeat. He was literally at the finish line and couldn't just serve it out. Still a very good result, good enough to nearly replace one of those challenger titles he'll be losing the points from, but that close to beating an athlete like Goncharenko, it's a tough loss to swallow and he won't soon forget it. He'd have had great chances to take his first pro title had he been able to finish off that last game. Sucks.

2038 WTC -- Level 3 Semifinals

There was no time to cry over the loss. One thing it did do was ensure he'd be match-fresh for what looked to be Sri Lanka's toughest WTC test. 21st-ranked Austria had won the luck of the draw when it came to surfaces, as this tie would be played on clay. Led by world No. 37 Julian Hammerstein, one of the physically strongest players in the world and very mentally tough, they also had a solid #2 singles in 89th-ranked Hannes Frankl. Both are far more adept on the dirt than Mehul & Chittoor, and objectively Sri Lanka are probably slight underdogs here. Since our re-entry into the WTC nearly two years ago, the national streak stands at a fantastic 11 straight victories, with no more than a single match lost in any of them. But none of those tests have been as stern as this one. This is the sixth straight year for Austria at Level 3, having been bounced down from Level 2 in 2032. Like us, they are getting better all the time and in a perfect world, both would promote up as we're clearly the class of Level 3 this year. That's to be determined in the playoffs down the road, but the winner here will improve their matchup and ranking when it comes time for that.

Monday: A. Mehul d. H. Frankl, 6-4, 6-1, 6-2

The pressure was on Mehul here as it was really a must-win match. He brought it home as expected, winning as many points on Frankl's serve as the Austrian did.

Tuesday: J. Hammerstein d. A. Chittoor, 6-1, 6-2, 6-1

This was also expected. I hoped it would be closer, but it was never a contest. Both of the reverse singles matchups could go either way, so tied at 1-all Sri Lanka went into the doubles match knowing it could well decide the outcome.

Wednesday: P. Nilima/A. Mehul d. T. Weidman/H. Frankl, 6-4, 7-5, 6-1

I have no idea why Mehul was moved back into the doubles team in place of Chittoor this time, but they got the job done with a vital win to move us one rubber away from advancing.

Thursday: J. Hammerstein d. A. Mehul, 6-2, 6-4, 6-4

The marquee clash of the week offered Mehul a chance to clinch the tie, but it didn't get off to a good start. Hammerstein's power was too much to deal with in the first set, but he quickly bounced back in the second by taking the first three games. He couldn't hold the lead, including blowing triple break point with a chance to get even again as the Austrian was trying to serve it out. That was pretty much the match. Hammerstein just bludgeoned him around the court, handing Mehul his first WTC singles defeat after 25 straight victories these past two years.

So for the first time, Sri Lanka has lost two matches in the same WTC tie and they are forced into a decisive fifth rubber. Going into it, Nigeria had already eliminated New Zealand in the other semifinal with a stunning upset by Vittoz over Anutofermo providing a 3-1 edge on Thursday. Frankl is the stronger player and much more proficient on clay, so he was holding most of the cards here. Chittoor has a slight advantadge in his baseline game and is also a little better mentally, so the one hope was that if Frankl had an off day and Amrik could prevail in the big moments of the match, he could pull off the upset and we would advance. The smart money though was on Hannes Frankl and team Austria.

Friday: H. Frankl d. A. Chittoor, 7-5, 6-1, 6-1

Yeah that was pretty disappointing. After putting up a good fight in the first set it was pretty obvious that Chittoor just plain gave up. Austria wins 3-2, moving on the finals while we can only wait for the playoffs. Sri Lanka drops a single spot to 51st in the rankings. Taking a look at the nations we might face then, I think we're basically a shoo-in for promotion, though if we've learned one thing this week it's never count your chickens before ,... you know.

The playoff tie won't arrive until the last week of the year, over two months from now. We've got an off week coming up next, to be followed by the Shanghai Masters and then the Paris Masters three weeks after that. During Shanghai Girsh will be in action in his next futures event, while Chittoor will be hitting the challenger circuit for the rest of the year. Both now have some points to make up, especially since they won't be participating in the WTC Finals.

During the unpleasantness of our WTC loss to Austria, I noticed that Anil Mehul had crossed a threshold for the first time. He's now entered the third of the five career stages in Rocking Rackets(as defined by me). This seemed a good time to describe these stages as it's the first time I'm going through the process with a strong player.

First Stage: Rapid Improvement The skills of a young player increase as does his physical maturity, allowing him to access more and more of his potential. From entering the junior tour at age 14, and of course even before that really, all players spend several years in this stage.

Second Stage: Seasoning, with Modest Improvement Once full physical maturity hits, the age varies depending on the player but with the long-term view and late-bloomers like Mehul and Girsh that make the best professionals, it's usually sometime around age 20 that this begins. The technical skillset continues to improve, but the physical aspect won't get any better. This is the point when the most training can be done, and therefore at which it is most important to have a trainer since professional and practice tournaments are not enough to keep them fully busy and engaged. This is the stage where Mehul has been until the last week or two.

Third Stage: Beginnings of physical decline, slow improvement. This stage, which usually lasts another several years and is basically the player's prime, is defined by the beginnings of decline in the physical skills. Endurance, which governs how tired a player gets from training, is affected at double the rate so eventually there will be a significant effect on how much the body recovers after training, further retarding development. It's very gradual at this stage and continued experience and progression of the player's understanding of the game, consistency in shotmaking, etc. are able to more than overcome the effects of Father Time. The player will continue to get better, but not as quickly as before since the better one gets the more effort is required to improve that little bit more, and erosion due to the fact that athletic ability is just starting to wane bit by tiny bit means that more and more it is the technical skills that must be relied upon.

Most reach this sooner than Mehul, but by age 23(he's 22 and a half) it has caught up with everyone. He has 635 career matches, 331 as a junior and nearly as many with 304 as a pro, and the miles you put on your body catch up with everyone. Manohar, by comparison, even though a far less successful player, has over a thousand matches now and this doesn't include all the practice and training, just official tournaments. Nobody is immune to the ticking clock, you can only achieve what you can while the body allows it. Usually this runs until some point in the late 20s.

As an idea of the numbers, entering the tie against Austria Mehul was at a career-high 31st. Only two players(18th-ranked Antonin Iglar and 27th-ranked John Condon) above him were younger. Meanwhile, just over half(16 of 30) of those above him are 28 or older, definitely on the decline phase of their career or at the very least about to embark on it. Several have passed 30 years of age. At this point, he'll continue to move up for a while merely by holding off the younger players after him, and just letting the vets slide on by during their twilight. Speaking of which, that brings up:

Fourth Stage: Increasing decline. Eventually, the body's athletic ability decreases to the point where technical improvements can no longer compensate. At this point, the downside of a player's career has been reached and all that can be done is to minimize the rate of decline. Generally speaking it's a process that accelerates over time. Manohar of course is nearing the end of his fall. A world-class player can still remain relevant for a few years -- Gorritepe as an extreme example is still Top 10 and a threat at the smaller 500 and 250-level professional events some 5 years or more after reaching his peak -- but nobody can reverse or stall he process entirely. By the time a player reaches the mid-30s, no matter how good they once were they are no longer relevant at the highest levels of the international stage. This will last until age 40, when all players auto-retire if they haven't chosen to so sooner.

Fifth Stage: Training others. A considerable amount of experience must be built up to become a trainer(I tested this out with Manohar and it took him half of year of not investing in any other improvement to acquire the necessary amount), which as mentioned above must be done prior to turning 40. A player who becomes a trainer can remain in that role until age 60, and is invaluable to the development of strong players in particular during the latter part of their first stage as well as the second and third stages. Eventually, by the later parts of the fourth stage, endurance will decline enough that trainers are no longer needed but for most of a top player's career they are beneficial. Lesser players, who often simply don't have the physical durability i.e. endurance to train as much, don't need the tutelage to nearly the same degree.

This may be of use to those of you who've signed up: I find the process of discovery interesting.

Oh this is super interesting! Never heard of this game but this sounds fascinating. I can't imagine having time for it, but...I'm gonna check it out and follow along too.

Shanghai Masters

Anil Mehul's draw really illustrated where he is in the tennis world right now. He could lose in the first round, or go deep, with each round presented the promise of a closely-fought challenge for him to navigate. First up was a rematch with Gries, who he'd beaten in the St. Petersburg QF. This was the German's best surface though, and he wasn't as worn as he had been then. Each set was decided by an early break, with Gries taking the first and Mehul coming back to take the second and an early lead in the third. The next two service games for him decided the matter, he had to fight off a break chance in each but pulled through, 3-6,6-3, 6-3.

Another player trying to move up waited in the second round, 13-seeded David Alvarez of Spain. He's one of a group of four players fighting to be in the Top 10 and separated by just 105 out of about 3500 points each. At this point of their respective careers it's pretty much a dead heat between these two. The main difference is, Alvarez would be highly favored on clay as he's a specialist on the dirt, but hardcourt or indoor and Mehul probably has the upper hand. That's the way it played out, with a tight 7-5, 6-4 win moving him on to the third round.

It's the third time in the last few months(Olympics, Canada Masters) that he's reached the final 16 at a big event. He lost on both of those occasions. Providing the obstacle here was world no. 6 Oliver Challenger, who had recently annihilated Chittoor in the second round at the USO. Mehul had never played him before. For the past couple of years, Challenger has been the best of the players who didn't quite have enough to challenge the Big 3, then Big 4, and now Big 5 with Benda joining the top tier of those competing for #1. Nearing his 29th birthday now, Challenger is starting to show his age and slide down towards the rest of the pack. He still figured to have a modest edge in strength and mental toughness to get him through, but an upset was not out of the question.

A slow start dropped the first three games, and while Mehul pushed hard a couple times he only had one break chance in the first set, missing it. After having to save a pair himself in the third game of the second set, he finally broke through and got Challenger's serve in the fourth game, though it took four more chances to do it. The American veteran found another gear at that point, rattling off four straight and eventually taking the match 6-3, 6-4. Challenger is still clearly the better player.

It was another solid result that should keep Mehul solidly in the mid-30s or thereabouts heading into the final big event of his personal season in Paris three weeks from now. There's a logjam right now with spots 28-37 separated by only 105 points, and the situation is very fluid. Three chances to make the quarters, and all denied so far.

The tournament as a whole showed how topsy-turvy things are at the top of the sport. Many of the top players lost sets early, including no. 5 Bjorn Benda, the closet thing there is right now to a player ready to subject the tour. World no. 1 Mick Elder was sent packing in the third round with surprising ease by Goncharenko, 6-2, 6-3. The post-Gorritepe era is defined more by chaos than any one dominant player. For a year or so Alastra was that guy, but no more. Any one of several players has a chance at winning the big events -- or going out early. In the end another blow was struck for the old guard, with no. 3 Almagro topping second-ranked Alastra in the final. Mehul temporarily cracked the Top 30 at a career-high 29th -- I say temporarily because next week the first of the two challenger titles from last year will drop off and he'll be back down to the mid-30s or so again.

In England, Girsh finally met his match -- barely -- in the final of his tier 1 futures event when he lost to fatigued American Joseph Skirrow in a tight third-set tiebreak. Skirrow is a player to remember, as he's 2-3 months younger than Girsh and looks like he may well prove a potential rival and foil years down the road. Girsh will have another futures event next, and probably his first challenger before the year is out.

I have my now 17yo to #60 in juniors and climbing. Won both the singles and doubles title at a JG4 hardcourt event in Miami. A couple months later, he won a JG2 tourney on hardcourt at Sfax. Now, to manage his match fatigue while also getting him into the premier junior-level tournaments in the months before he turns 18.

Sounds like good progress! FYI he can still enter tournaments up until the end of the calendar year in which he turns 18, not just until the birthdate. In other words, if he turns 18 in the spring, he can still participate until the end of the year. Whether it's a good idea for him to do that or not is another matter and will depend on the player.

In considering my players the last few days, I've come to a decision which I'll mention now partly because it provides a good opportunity to mention some research that goes along with it, as it may be useful to the others who have decided to join other game worlds.

Current ages of my players, as I type this:

Anil Manohar -- 35 years, 45 weeks
Anil Mehul -- 22 years, 30 weeks
Amrik Chittoor -- 21 years, 35 weeks
Girish Girsh -- 19 years, 24 weeks

Obviously Mehul-Chittoor-Girsh are bunched very closely together. In about three years game time, Mehul+Girsh will be a very potent combo, but what of the next generation? There is one other quality young player, which another manager snatched up before I could get to them -- Shreya Ujjaval, presently 15 years old. I can't depend on him for a number of reasons -- the manager may keep them out of the WTC(though this is unwise, more on this in a moment) and they are presently being poorly managed, entered in tournaments Ujjaval isn't ready for yet. Should still probably become a Top 100 player but not much more. Ujjaval has a bit above-average mental toughness, good but not great athlete similar to Mehul, and excellent but not elite in terms of durability. Definitely has an elite feel for the game, a little better than even any of my current players. So I wish I'd have been able to grab him, but it didn't happen.

In terms of getting a next-generation player myself, the question is timing. At the end of this year a newcomer would be 5 years, maybe a bit more, younger than Girsh. I don't really want to go any more than that, otherwhise it's too big of a gap to have two players close to their prime. Also, with Manohar having about four years left before he becomes a trainer, that's nearly a perfect window for having the new player be ready for a trainer about the time he's ready to start doing that job, and then there would be another decent gap there with that same four years back to another youngster -- it just seems like the right time. It will hurt Sri Lanka a bit in the WTC since I won't be able to control Chittoor's readiness or training anymore at that point, though he'll still be playing for us until he is surpassed by Girsh in the rankings. That's one reason why I want to wait until the end of the year, so that I can have some control over what happens in the WTC Promotion Playoff.

All of that leads into me really wanting to pool all the knowledge I've acquired about how to train players well, since with the next youngster getting training assistance I'll be able to get them closer to their maximum potential. I took a look at the experience my players were getting from different kinds of matches, and came up with some numbers.

** Doubled tire out a player less, but give less experience as well, ending up at the same basic ratios so doubles/singles is not a consideration.

** Having close matches is important. In all categories, any match in which both players win at least 40% of the points gives the full amount of experience. If there is a greater split than that(i.e. 70-30 or whatever) a sliding scale diminishes the amount a player learns from it.

Practice Tournaments -- I used these as the baseline. They certainly are and should be the most common for players coming up. So I gave this baseline a 100% score. 250-level events train at the same rate. Experience is given based on points played in all cases.

Friendly Matches -- The court of last resort as I've mentioned previously when practice/regular tournaments don't use up all of a player's energy for a week. These only tire a player out at two-thirds the standard rate, but unfortunately they only provide one-third of the experience for a 50% overall training efficiency. Worse, once a player reaches about the Top 50 as Mehul has, it becomes more difficult to find a quality opponent for these. Lower-level friendly match partners are often drawn, resulting in even worse efficiency as they are often blowout matches. This underlines the importance of ...

Training Sessions -- These are not matches per se, all that you get is experience gained and fatigue used. I'm still checking on these by looking at high-level players in my game world, but from what I'm seeing so far as a rough guideline, a good(4.0) trainer gives about 65% of a good practice match on average, with an elite(5.0) trainer at about 80-85%. I don't think it is possible to have a trainer over 5.0, as I've seen several at that level but none above it. I've spotted trainers as low as 3.1, but this is rare. After all even a career journeyman-at-best like Manohar now sits at what would be a 3.9, and I'm still working on him.

Amateurs/Low Juniors(JG1-JG5) -- These are strange, and present a mystery. Most are just below a practice match at a 93% score, but some of them gave less experience at 81% and I couldn't figure out why. There didn't seem to be a pattern between them, my only guess is that the lower-yield ones had really high levels of double faults. Regardless, in terms of gaining experience and getting better, a junior player will do better in practice tournaments than actual junior events. So unless they are a junior-focused players playing in the big tournaments, they should only be playing enough to keep form decent.

Futures/Challengers/500s/Qualifying/WTF Round Robin -- Don't ask me why the 500s were lumped in here, it's probably an unresolved bug. Anyway, any matches from these events all came in at the 93% rate. The round-robin matches from the elite World Tour Finals is even more of a head-scratcher, but it seems the game treats them as qualifying. All qualifying(Grand Slam on all the way down) is treated the same in terms of efficiency of training from the experience.

Masters Series/WTF SF and F/JGA -- Here's where it starts getting better. Once a player can compete at this level they gain 140% of the experience an identical practice tournament match would produce.

Grand Slam/WTC/JTC/JGS -- The world team events, professional and junior, and the slams at both levels are as one would expect them to be the pinnacle here. These produce 185% of the per-point experience, and when you add in the fact that at the pro level they are best-of-5 not best-of-3 sets, putting in competitive matches in these prestigious tournaments can really rack up the experience. In a situation such as my game world is in with a number of top players and a lot of late-round Slam matches going the distance, the top competitors are essentially constantly pushing each other to get just that little bit better.

At this point I think I've learned about 95% of what I can learn in terms of training players up better, and I'm ready to hit the ground running with the next stud. I hope.

Paris Masters

The last Masters event of the year is unique in several aspects, and relatively speaking fairly chaotic -- especially for player in Mehul's ranking range. It is the only Masters event played on the indoor/carpet surface, and advantage as he's fairly strong in that area. It also has the smallest field, just 48 entries. 16 of these are seeded, the next 16 are direct entry but four of those are wild cards. Then there are also 16 qualifiers, and Mehul found himself as one of the best in this group. In reality all that really meant was an extra, nearly-free 25 point for going through against much weaker players in qualifying.

Since all of the seeds get first-round byes though, after a double-bagel win in qualifying he had good chances for a fairly easy match to start the main draw. What he got though was French wild-card Roman Iraugui(41st), a player who is on his way up and near the peak of his powers. In overall physicality he's one of the best out there and frankly should be a higher-ranked player. Especially with the home crowd behind him, it looked likely Mehul would be exiting after this match. Iraugui has probably been mismanaged, and he's overplayed some coming into this event but not overly so.

It was not that Mehul didn't have his plusses(better baseline game, more indoor familiarity, perfect preparation coming in), but it with a considerable gap in athleticism and also a smaller one in mental toughness, the Frenchman did appear to be a definite favorite. There may be no surface on which the athletic element means less than lightning-fast indoor, but I was still pretty shocked by the scoreline. Mehul trounced Iraugui, 6-1, 6-1, a pair of breadsticks! The result would have been quite frustrating were I on the other end of it, but in this case of course I was quite pleased.

Up next was 13-seed Jens Oberg of Sweden, a flash-in-the-pan or phoenix type of player who was already on the decline just past his 24th birthday. Oberg had been ranked as high as 7th in the world within the past year. Overall it figured to be a pretty even match with Mehul a slight underdog. Unfortunately this one was a surprise in the other direction with Oberg waltzing through a 6-3, 6-3 win. A late rally by Mehul in the second set was cut short as a double-fault set up match point, and that was it.

With the loss, it is more likely than not that he will not make into the seeds for next year's AO but fall a bit short, though much has yet to be determined. Meanwhile, Amrik Chittoor was in action, entered in a mid-level challenger in Eckental, Germany. He was upset in the quarterfinals in three sets by American Ralph Kippen, a match neither player played well in but one he should have won.

There will now be a break of several weeks leading up to the WTC playoffs, which will once again launch a busy period heading into the next year regardless of what happens there. In the interim there won't be anything bigger than Challengers for any of the players to participate in, so I'll once again recap the results once that important tie arrives.

Basic questions so that I could maybe peek in to what you're doing. Which game world are you in? And do you actually control WTC setup? If so, is that by virtue of being the #1 manager of Sri Lankan nationality? And do you gain that nationality by managing strictly Sri Lankan players?

Also, surprising to see that about practice tournaments. With a 15yo and 17yo with relatively low skill, it seems like they would get waxed by whomever they might be paired up with. Would that really be a better option than the JG and AMA tournaments for players that inexperienced?

** I'm in Game World 1.
** No, I don't control WTC setup. I can only manage the players I can find. For example, I don't manage Prakash Nilima, who has been a fixture on the doubles.
** Practice tournaments pair you off in groups with players of the same basic ranking. They are in groups of usually 6-10, so the highest-ranking 6-10 juniors would play against each other that week, then the next half-dozen or so, etc. Usually this ends up in fairly competitive matchups. Plus, if you are playing JG/AMA's all the time, your form is going to go through the roof, meaning you A) will get penalties to how well you play, and B) won't gain as much experience.

Thanks, and good to know about practice tourneys. I've experienced the same thing with the 17yo (Delacave, a Frenchman) and thus far have dealt with it by having him not play back-to-back tourneys frequently. I'll certainly look into the practice tourneys now!

The brief 'offseason' is now over. The WTC Playoffs are upon us, but first there are other goings-on to get caught up on.

World Tour Finals

This year's final has a couple of interesting things to note, and provides an opportunity to look at the current situation with respect to the 'changing of the guard' Involved in this are essentially three generations of players.

The Greatest

Eric Gorritepe's string of 11 straight WTF events ends this year, though not by much. Sullivan and Prieto each managed 10 appearances, so once again Gorritepe has the top spot in the record books here. He hasn't won a major event in two years now and lost in the round-robin-stage each of the past two seasons, but still finished just 90 points out of the final spot -- not bad for a guy more than four years older than anyone in the field.

Alastra & Co.

Gabriel Alastra comes in with the best chance of taking the year-end #1 for the third straight year. If he makes the final, that spot will be assured, yet for all his success he has never won tennis's 'fifth pillar'. Mick Elder, who took the #1 for several weeks late in the year, was the undefeated champion last year in his debut and will need to do that again to have any realistic chance of getting that perch back. David Almagro, David Prieto, and Oliver Challenger are all making at least their fourth straight appearance. It looks likely to be the last go-round for Challenger, and indeed it could be the final time that this generation of contenders dominates the field. Despite a shocking run to the Paris title a few weeks ago, Spasoje Kucerovic will not be back.

Generation Next

The next-gen players are approximately three years younger than Alastra et al, and only one has been here before: Perry Hogue lost in the round-robin stage last season, upsetting Gorritepe in his final match to keep the legend from making it any further. Bjorn Benda and Evgeni Topolski make their first appearances this time around. All three hope to use this as a springboard to greater success next year.

There are others in the same age group that could make a push next year -- Jens Oberg, David Alvarez, and Viktor Goncharenko, who is particularly noteworthy as he's the best athlete of the bunch. The parity in the top 12-15 right now is extreme, and the difference in those who succeed and those who don't is miniscule. Often proper management and optimal preparation for the big events, or frankly just plain luck is what will matter most over the next year or two.

Round-Robin Stage

Alastra plowed through without losing a match in the first group, not a huge surprise. More surprising was that Bjorn Benda failed to win a set against either the word no. 1 or Oliver Challenger, ending his first WTF as a group play loser. In the second group, the story was Perry Hogue who also went through unbeaten, while defending champion Mick Elder was eliminated on tiebreakers. This assured that Alastra would retain the year-end #1 position.

Elimination Stage

The semifinals were anticlimactic straight-set affairs, and Alastra met Hogue in the final, both men having won all four of their matches to reach this point. Days before his 29th birthday, the Argentine claimed the one big trophy that has eluded him, barely outlasting the American challenger 6-4, 1-6, 7-6(4). He actually lost more points than he won(99-103) but was stronger in the big moments, saving 8 of 10 break points.

Not that there was much doubt about it as it was, but this cements Gabriel Alastra's place as this era's premier player. It also provides him with a considerable cushion in the rankings. Everyone else will be chasing him for a good part of next year at a minimum. Hogue is clearly on the rise after making the final here and in Paris, and wih Topolski also reaching the semifinals that meant two of the three participants of the younger generation acquitted themselves well. Next year, they could well be in the majority here.

As for my players, Anil Mehul was a victim of a quirk of the ranking system. He was ineligible to play any singles events since he was too highly ranked to play any challengers(top 32 are forbidden). He dropped below that after the last of his challenger titles dropped off, but that was the last week of challengers for the year. To keep himself in proper match shape for the WTC he was forced to play a couple of futures doubles events.

Amrik Chittoor won the mid-level challenger in Toyota, Japan for a second straight year, while Girsh Girsh made another futures final before heading off to his first challenger event in Salzburg. It didn't go well -- he lost in the first round of qualifying. He's at a, well, challenging stage of his career that everyone has to go through. Futures tournaments are a little beneath him, but he's not good enough to move up. Until that changes, he'll be playing mostly futures which at least allow for keeping him in match shape, then doing as many practice weeks as possible in between and throwing in a challenger every once in a while until he can make his breakthrough at that level.

WTC Results & Draw

It was a surprise to nobody to see Austria beat Nigeria 4-1 in the Level 3 championship tie. That set the stage for the playoff draw, which appears to be completely random from everything I can determine. The four nations finishing last in their Level 2 groups and the four semifinalists from Level 3 are thrown into a hopper and paired off. Winners will play Level 2 next year, losers Level 3.

I was very confident of our chances so long as we didn't draw Austria again. The odds were with us, but stranger things have happened. As it ended up, we will face Nigeria. That's very bad luck for them -- we handled them easily earlier in the year and should do so again. They have now made the Level 3 Final two years in a row only to apparently have unfavorable draws in the playoffs essentially wipe out that effort.

2038 WTC Level 2-3 Playoffs
Sri Lanka vs. Nigeria

Grass, not the favorite surface for either nation, was selected for this tie. I didn't expect it to matter much.

Monday: A. Mehul d. Y. Bozza, 6-3, 6-1, 6-1
Tuesday: A. Chittoor d. G. Vittoz, 5-7, 6-3, 6-4, 6-2
Wednesday: G. Vittoz/D. Labbe d. A. Chittoor/P. Nilima, 6-3, 6-2, 6-2
Thursday: A. Mehul d. G. Vittoz, 7-5, 6-1, 6-2
Friday: A. Chittoor d. Y. Bozza, 6-0, 6-2, 6-4

Another 4-1 win means more disappointment for the Nigerians while we gain another promotion, joining Level 2 for the 2039 season! Only one step away from the prestigious top tier now. Vittoz gave his best effort in the first set against both of our players, but was worn down after that. A typical tie for us, impregnable in singles but the doubles was a match to forget for us.

After moving up from 86th to 67th a year ago, in 2038 Sri Lanka makes a similar upward move to 51st at year's end. As is always the case this time of year the turnaround is quick. Objectively I think we are better than most in Level 2 but not as good as most of the nations in the elite top level, so there is a significant chance a third straight promotion might not come -- or if it does, that we won't be able to hold it.

First things first, of course. Chinese Taipei(25th), Italy(10th), and Japan(36th) are our competitors in Group 3 for the new year. Despite their ranking Italy is a power in decline: this will be their fifth straight year at this level. Actually has been a power in decline would be more accurate. A narrow 3-2 loss to tiny Monaco and their rising star Veniard is all that kept them from rejoining the best for this year. I would put us as co-favorites with the Italians to win the group, Taipei is a sinking ship with aging star Dou-wan Chou their only threat but Japan has a couple of decent players and should probably finish third. I think we have very good chances to make it out of group play once again. We'll first meet Japan, and a win there should all but guarantee it.

2038 Final Rankings -- Top Ten

While there is technically another week yet to go, there are no events in which the top players can participate, only futures and below, so these are set.

1. Gabriel Alastra(29, ARG) -- 11,280

It's very unlikely he'll lose the top spot before the summer with a 2,000-point cushion. He'll enter the year with 62 weeks spent as #1, while Elder/Prieto/Almagro have 47 combined. If this is the year for age to catch up with the four-time defending Wimbledon champion, there's little evidence of it right now.

2. Mick Elder(27, USA) -- 9,210

Despite a poor end to the year, this was by far the best season to date for the youngest of his generation's quartet of challengers. He was 5th a year ago with more than 1600 fewer points to his name including eight titles. Three of those were in Masters events, yet he was unimpressive at the Slams prior to taking the US Open title. He'll need to be more consistent if he wants to add to the two months he spent at the top of the rankings towards the end of the year.

3. David Almagro(28, ESP) -- 8,320

Almagro had a title on all four surfaces this year, and could well be in the mix again providing his manager doesn't go AWOL during a slam like during the US Open this past year.

4. Bjorn Benda(24, DEU) -- 8,210

Benda became the best in the world on clay, taking four of his five titles on the dirt including a maiden Slam title at the French Open. Too many early exits in Masters events contributed to an uneven showing on other surfaces though, a flaw which will need to be addressed if he is to reach the summit of the sport.

5. David Prieto(28, ESP) -- 7,370

After a lightning-fast start produced four titles in the first quarter(Chennai, Sydney, Australian Open, Miami Masters), Prieto added just two more the rest of the season, including a second straight winless effort at the tour finals. If he doesn't repeat in Australia, a tumble from the ranks of the contenders seems very likely.

6. Perry Hogue(24, USA) -- 6,240

For most of the year it looked like the meteoric American had peaked, but a great finish indicates otherwhise. He made the quarters of only one Slam(Australia) and won nothing larger than two 500-level events in the fall. If he can follow up his WTF run with better performances on the big stages early in the year, Hogue might well become a legitimate member of the group chasing Alastra.

7. Evgeni Topolski(25, RUS) -- 4,845

Missing the US Open wasn't a great moment, but all three of his tournament titles came after that(Canada Masters, Kremlin Cup, China Open). Add a semifinal run at the tour finals and there's no question that the one new member of this year's Top 10 is a hot commodity.

8. Oliver Challenger(29, USA) -- 4,425

Down from fourth last year, it's clear he no longer has what it takes to compete at the highest level. He's still got his moments, as he showed in a semifinal appearance at the tour finals.

9. Eric Gorritepe(33, ESP) -- 3,935

The ageless wonder actually moved up a spot. At this rate he might never retire.

10. Spasoje Kucerovic(28, SRB) -- 3,850

A stunning win at the Paris Masters put him back in this group, but he didn't do much elsewhere.


Parity and competition are definitely on the rise right now. The Top 10 players last year combined for about 10% more points than this year's group. Particularly from Topolski(7th) down through about the Top 15-18 spots there is expected to be a lot of shuffling and shifting. Declining veterans like Challenger and Kucerovic could find it increasingly difficult to maintain relevance.

A New Star on the Horizon

As I mentioned a bit ago, it was now time for a new youngster in my Sri Lanka stable, as it were. After seven and a half years, I pulled the trigger and fired Amrik Chittoor, presently considered the third-best player the country has ever had. He's going nowhere in singles right now(actually slid a couple spots from 91st to 93rd this year) but more importantly of course there was the need to have another top player coming up to follow Girsh.

It's been long enough that I had a couple cracks at it, which is a good thing since the first player I found wasn't very good. The second was better though. Prakash Mooljee is the latest young stud, and he looks to be the best athlete I've ever managed, a hair stronger and faster than Mehul, and also has a bit more natural talent than any of the others, even Chittoor. He's not quite as strong mentally but is between Girsh and Mehul in terms of dedication to the practice courts. The biggest flaw is that he's pretty raw, a little behind in his development comparatively speaking. Still, I think he should definitely be able to reach the Top 20 at some point. He'll also develop a little faster and decline a little sooner than the others, but definitely is still a pro-focused player instead of junior-focused, which is what I'm looking for.

I'm altering my approach with Mooljee a bit compared to the others. First, I'm going for an even familiarity across all four surfaces. This is probably suboptimal for his personal achievement -- specialists tend to do somewhat better by getting a lot of points on their favored surface -- but I want to eventually be able to avoid situations like the recent loss against Austria in which they had a sizable advantage due to our weakness on clay. I also may mix in amateur events while he's still a junior from time to time, something I've never done before. I think they are a better fit for younger players, I'll probably just skip them and go straight to futures once he turns pro. Most of the events still need to be juniors though to keep him at an appropriate ranking -- otherwhise the competition for practice tournaments won't be good enough.

2039

I've now journeyed through just over a full year in this thread, and we have come full circle back to the beginning of a new season.

Sri Lanka Rankings Update

All comparisons here at to last year's status.

Anil Mehul -- 73rd to 36th singles, 206th to 291st doubles. In terms of getting into seeded territory for the Slams, he's still on the outside looking in. This week we have the first round of the WTC against Japan, and he'll be playing in the Chennai(India) 250 the week after. Chances of moving up are slim, since the 'warmup' small events ahead of the Australian Open have a lot more top players than similar tournaments later in the year. This is simply a function of the schedule -- with the off-season over, everyone wants to get in optimal match condition for the first major of the year and start the season off well.

Girish Girsh -- 357th singles, 1557th doubles. A very solid first year on tour for Girsh, who still has a few months left of his teenage years. He's surpassed Manohar now and with Chittoor's termination he is my #2 player. In a couple years time he'll probably be playing in the WTC. Last week Girsh had a competitive QF loss in a big clay futures event, a decent result for a surface he's weak on.

Girsh is consistently soundly beating the players he's matched up with in practice weeks, so I'm going to be increasing his tournament frequency some until that is no longer the case. He needs more consistent quality competition right now. Physically he's almost at his peak, which he'll reach later this year it appears.

Anil Manohar -- 436th to 442nd singles, 659th to 1472nd doubles. Manohar worked on doubles almost exclusively this year, getting his projected trainer level up to excellent(4.0, or 3.998 to be precise). I discovered an undocumented change from some while back -- players don't have to retire until 45, trainers run from retirement to 65, both 5 years above the original limit. So I've got more time to build him up than I thought.

Paradoxically, he nearly stalled Father Time in singles with his best results in years for a few weeks in the fall, but then returned to planet earth with some early exits to finish the year. He's purely a low-level futures player at this point, Tier 3s mostly. I expect a significant fall in his ranking this year.

Prakash Mooljee -- Unranked. He's getting practice time in and balancing out his surface proficiencies right now, with an eye on his first junior event in probably about a month.

Manager Ranking -- As for me, I'm pretty much where I've been most of the year, hovering around 10k points and 29th(high is 27th). I'm hoping to start slowly moving up at some point this year again, though I have no real goals attach to where I am ranked, it's more just an overall measurement of how well everything else is going.


Stars of Tomorrow

In the WTF update I mentioned the three(now two) generations making an impact at the very top of the sport. This seems a good time to also get into the next couple of waves of players.

The Stars of Tomorrow are those players who are around 22 years old right now, Mehul included. As a group they are generally a little less than two years younger than Bjorn Benda. It's a sizable group, which I would divide into the following hierarchy:

** Antonin Iglar. He's the youngest of the group, with an elite(5th in the rankings) manager and a 5.0 trainer, former world No. 4 Anthony Williams. Iglar is also the best all-around athlete of the group, possessing excellent speed and strength both. His only weakness is that he's doesn't have quite the dedication to the game that some others do. Presently ranked 16th, he's far ahead of the curve and it's not out of the question that he could be a participant in this year's WTF. I think Iglar will surpass Alastra and become the best player since Gorritepe. Everyone in this generation of players is chasing him and probably fighting for second best.

** Julian Hammerstein & Anil Mehul. This is a natural rivalry in a lot of ways. Hammerstein is a mere two weeks older, and has Austria rising through the WTC ranks just as Sri Lanka does, as we saw last year with his straight-set win in the first meeting. I expect there will be many more of them. Hammerstein is slow for a top player and is a little behind Mehul in baseline skills, but his power is an overwhelming asset. He's got a solid trainer and a definite edge in the mental game, though dedication is once again a bit suspect. I expect him to have the advantage over Mehul, though on the faster surfaces Anil should have chances. Hammerstein is presently ranked 26th, second in this generation.

** The field. There's a lot of others who will push them. Perry Mockler(USA, 27th) has a big server but not much athleticism to back it up; John Condon(PHI, 29th) is a poor man's Hammerstein, a powerful clay specialist; Chad Dring(USA, 33rd) is tough and very fast, but spent too much time on the doubles court for a player of only good dedication; Siobhan O'Doherty(IRE, 35th) is a flake: supremely talented but he simply refuses to take being a professional athlete seriously(think Ernests Gulbis here); and Mikaiala Groeneveldt(LUX, 38th), another player without enough of a work ethic but don't sleep on him too much: he's a fabulous athlete, almost as fast as Dring and almost as strong as Hammerstein. That's wont carry him to the top, but it's more than enough to make him dangerous(Gael Monfils, anyone?).

Outlook

It looks like Mehul should be able to make it to the Top 5 at some point, but beyond that is anyone's guess. He's spending more time on the practice courts than any of the competitors here, but that won't completely make up for the lack of a trainer. Some of the players in 'the field' are definitely not managed optimally, so there's a lot of things still yet to be seen.


Young Guns

Here I'll take a quick look at the prospects for Girish Girsh, another roughly three years down the road. I should mention here that there are another seven Top 100 players who are about a year behind Mehul et al., so depending on how they pan out there could be an absolute logjam at the top when Girsh's generation rises up.

In his general age group a couple years younger, the leader right now is Matias Cortecedo(157th), extending Spain's seemingly unenending supply of talent. There is an absolute epidemic of 20-year-old 'burnouts'(i.e., players who both develop and age quickly) and probably a few of those will be relevant in a few years but most will not. There are only two other players in the under-20 age group currently ranked above Girsh: former junior #1 Mugur Kinczllers and previously mentioned American Joseph Skirrow.

The overall sense of things is that starting with Mehul's generation, the talent level and competition seems to be hitting a high point. I'd peg Girsh as a probable Top 10 player right now but trying to predict things this far out is a fool's errand for the most part. He's got a promising future, and will definitely be a successful pro, but how good remains to be seen.

2039 World Team Cup First Round-Robin Round -- Level 2, Group 3
Sri Lanka vs. Japan

Indoor was selected for this tie, the best surface for us.

Monday: A. Chittoor d. S. Hotate, 6-3, 5-7, 6-3, 6-3
Tuesday: A. Mehul d. S. Ko, 6-0, 6-2, 6-1
Wednesday: H. Hayuata/A. Ota d. A. Chittoor/P. Nilima, 6-1, 7-6(2), 6-4
Thursday: A. Mehul d. S. Hotate, 6-0, 6-2, 6-2
Friday: A. Chittoor d. S. Ko, 6-2, 6-2, 3-6, 6-2

Another 4-1 win. Chittoor was pushed to four sets in both of his wins and we drop the doubles per usual. Italy did not lose a set against hapless Chinese Taipei, who we will face in our next tie while they take on Japan. It appears to be all but certain that the group's top spot will be determined by the final-round matchup against Italy.

Sri Lanka moves up three spots to a new high of 48th, once again off to a good start. At this level each win is worth 35 points instead of 25 to the players individually, and Mehul moves up to 32nd, right on the bubble for seeding. Due to a number of top players entering in Chennai, he switches to the Brisbane event instead, another 250-level tournament but in Australia.

After a couple of weeks off, I'll report on events there and at the Australian Open.

The last couple of weeks have been unexpectedly fantastic. First up, Mehul entered the 250 event in Brisbane, Australia instead of Chennai where so many top players entered that he wouldn't even have been seeded. He needed to get a few matches in and try to get enough points to move up some if possible. The early rounds went as expected and Mick Elder awaited in the quarterfinals. That was enough to prepare him for the AO, and figured to be the end of the road. Instead, Mehul stunned the world no. 2, 6-4, 7-6(3) and it could have been more decisive. It was his first win in four meetings with Elder, and any win over a player of that stature is huge. At least for the day, he had arrived as a player that could hang with the best in the sport.

Next up was none other than Julian Hammerstein, who had benefited by the way from Chittoor knocking off unprepared no. 18 Kecic to clear the way. Unable to utilize his power nearly as effectively as he did last year in the WTC matchup on clay, Hammerstein's slowness of foot allowed Mehul to dictate from the baseline more often than not and another tough two-set win, 7-5, 7-5, put him in the final! There waiting was the hottest player in the world, Perry Hogue, and he fairly easily took the title but it was still a fantastic start to the year, vaulting Mehul to 29th in the world for the third time.

The next week, Girish Girsh was in action in the only non-clay top-tier futures event of the first month of the season, in Metz, France. It was a very strong field due to this fact, and he was the 7th-seed but felt good about his chances on an indoor court. Only one of his first three matches was remotely competitive, but things got tougher at the business end of the tournament. A pair of Frenchmen, strongly supported by the partisan crowd, got their shot. In the final, having knocked off regular foe Jesper Fine in the semifinals, Paul-Mathieu Bergerat gave Girsh a real run. It wasn't enough though, he pushed through 7-6(4), 6-4 and claimed his maiden first-tier futures crown after losing twice in the final and once in the quarters in three previous attempts. Ranked up to a new best of 275th afterwards, he will now take several weeks off before taking another shot at breaking into the challenger level of competition.


2039 Australian Open

And so it was that Anil Mehul entered the AO equaling his career-best rank at 29th, and seeded 28th. The difference was accounted for by the fact that 13th-ranked Jens Oberg, who is fairly well if imperfectly managed by the #13 manager by ranking, decided to play only doubles as did the other player under his tutelage. Quite a strange decision considering Oberg was a semifinalist here last year and will now take a zero-pointer, dropping him down to around 17th and opening the door a little wider. It must be an oversight, but a pretty costly one.

It's worth noting in a brief aside that In four of the five 250s in the two weeks leading up to the Australian Open, at least half of the top seeds were knocked off prior to reaching the semifinals. Among the titlists was rising star Antonin Iglar who I mentioned at the outset of this year, the first pro title for anyone of his generation(the 'Stars of Tomorrow'). Undoubtedly the first of many in his case. Things are so fluid and highly unpredictable at the top right now -- everybody has to take advantage of any opportunity given.

At any rate, Mehul had a draw that looked to offer him good chances to make this a very successful event. The farthest he's previously made it here was the second round last year, and never past the third in any Slam. Going into the tournament it felt like he was now turning a corner, finally ready to fully enter his assault on the shrinking number of players ahead of him. With the big wins a couple of weeks ago, he feels he has at least a chance against almost anyone, almost anywhere.

American Tommy Day, two years removed from being the junior no. 1, took just five games in the first round. The second match was more competitive but another straight-sets win. The third round brought #10 Spasoje Kucerovic, who won their lone previous meeting in a third-set tiebreak at Indian Wells last year. On clay he'd be the better player but hardcourt is Kucerovic's weakest surface, making this a pretty favorable matchup for this stage of the tournament. It wasn't easy, but Mehul advanced to the last 16 for the first time at a slam, 7-6(4), 6-4, 6-7(4), 6-4. He was able to keep Spasoje guessing just enough to blunt his power, and already it's a second win against the Top 10.

Standing in the way of a quarterfinal berth was a first encounter with no. 4 Bjorn Benda. The German had already bettered an early exit here last year, and has not dropped a set this year with only one set in the last two rounds even competitive. Once again Anil had the advantage of going up against a player that is not at their best on the hardcourts, but Bjorn is probably the only player in the world that can hang with him from the baseline along with having a better serve and all-around athleticism. It's a much different matchup than Kucerovic was. Unfortunately Mehul just came out and stunk it up -- everybody has bad days but this was just embarassing. 6-0, 6-3, 6-3 was the final, and other than a brief period in the second set he just wasn't nearly good enough, losing just over the half the points on his own serve and getting broken seven times. At this stage of his career, a beatdown like this, no matter the opponent or situation, is pretty much just inexcusable.

While his generational rivals Iglar and Hammerstein also made it to the fourth round, they likewise lost in straight sets. Mehul could also take some solace in the fact that he was the lowest-ranked player to make it that far. 7 of the top 8 seeds made it to the quarterfinals, making a convincing statement with their play that there is certainly a limit to the cries of parity, and they aren't about to surrender their lofty positions easily. The eighth is worth mentioning as well, #11 David Alvarez, who reached that stage without the loss of a single set and handed out a ridiculous triple-bagel to worn-out Tihomir Hreglic, allowing just 22 points! Hreglic, ranked 22nd coming in here, had been fresh enough to rally from behind to knock out Challenger in the previous match, and generally speaking routs of that severity just don't happen to players of his stature. All together it set up what looked to be a fantastic second week with the elite players all looking like they were close to the top of their games.

The Australian Open came down to defending champion David Prieto against Perry Hogue who is on a real tear to start the year. Prieto made it three straight with a straight-sets win, dropping only one set in the tournament, a semi-final tiebreak to Alastra. Meanwhile, David Alvarez's strong showing bumped him into the Top 10 while Challenger dropped all the way down to 11th.

At the same time, Prakash Moojee was in Poland for a Tier 5 junior event, the lowest level of tournament with only 16 in the main draw. He'd managed to nearly double his meager technical skills going in and won a couple matches in singles and doubles each before going out in the quarters and semis respectively. Fatigue was as much a cause of the loss as anything else. Low-level junior matches are essentially a roll of the dice and they tend to be very long. Without developed technique, errors are very common and the advantage of the serve is virtually nil, leading to a lot more long games. He debuted at 1121st in the rankings but will move up from there fairly quickly. Right now that's really almost irrelevant, getting the match experience is what matters.

2039 WTC Level 2 Group 3, Second Round-Robin Round
Chinese Taipei vs. Sri Lanka

This tie was played on grass, but it could have been played on the moon for all that it mattered.

Monday: A. Chittoor d. D. Chow, 6-0, 6-1, 6-0
Tuesday: A. Mehul d. B. Bi, 6-0, 6-0, 6-2
Wednesday: A. Chittoor/P. Nilima d. T. Ang/T. Si-Ma, 5-7, 7-6(5), 6-3, 6-2
Thursday: A. Mehul d. D. Chow, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0
Friday: A. Chitoor d. B. Bi, 6-1, 6-4, 6-2

Other than doubles, it really wasn't worth watching -- a total bloodbath. Italy beat Japan as expected, but only 3-2 on account of their second-best player retiring early at age 33 to become a trainer. A short-sighted move by the manager there, and for team Italy they lack a similar replacement. This changes the look of things considerably. We are now near-prohibitive favorites to win our final group tie against them and take the top spot in Group 3. Even should an upset occur, our spot in the quarterfinals is booked and the entrance exam in Level 2 has been passed. Looking down the road, New Caledonia and Denmark could be tough, but the top competition appears once again to be Austria. It's more likely than not that our budding rivalry with them with have another chapter added, and I wouldn't mind avenging what is to date our only WTC defeat one bit.

Sri Lanka edges up a spot to 47th, while Anil Mehul moves up to his latest career-best at 23rd. It's a full month now of relative quiet coming up, leading up to the big American hardcourt masters and what will be a busy clay season this year following that as Mehul will be playing all of the Masters tournaments there as well for the first time.

Question for ya: I now have a couple of 18-year-olds. What's the process for working them up through the ranks of Futures and Challenger tournaments? As of now, I'm putting the guys in enough FT3s to keep their form in the low yellow and getting them as many PRAs as I can fit in among those.

You've pretty much got it. Going from futures to challengers is the toughest part in my opinion, because players can get stuck for a while in being 'too good' for futures but not good enough for challengers. In general, I think they should play at a level that they can be fairly successful at, but not to the point of there being no competition. If they are consistently winning FT3s, I'd move them up. Generally speaking I want my players to be losing in the QF and SF to have the best balance of improving their ranking and training up their skills. Winning the tournament is better than going out in the first round, but neither is optimal for development.

February - March 2039

The American Masters are upon us. Here's what my players have been up to the last few weeks:

Anil Mehul -- Rotterdam(500, Indoor) was chosen as the in-between event, his first 500-level tournament. Memphis was another indoor 500 the following week, but he wanted to make sure he was able to be seeded and others might join that one at last minute if they didn't do well here. Mehul was the 7th seed and had the easiest possible route through the opening rounds, a qualifier and then the winner of a matchup of qualifiers.

In the quarters, he got his second chance at #1 Gabriel Alastra, having lost in straight-sets in the opening round of the USO two years ago. This is Alastra's worst surface, and it was a back-and-forth battle with neither player able to sustain an advantage for long. After a pair of tiebreaks were split, Mehul got the decisive break in the 10th game of the final set for a 7-6(5), 6-7(4), 6-4 win despite actually taking two fewer points in the match. In the semifinals, he had a second meeting with Gorritepe. The last time they'd met, Mehul had surprisingly prevailed in two tough tiebreaks in last year's Canada Masters a few months back. It was another extremely tight one here, with the legend prevailing 6-4, 6-7(4), 7-6(7) in a final-set tiebreak that could have gone either way. This time it was Mehul taking more points(112-106) yet losing the match. He did not break Gorritepe once despite 10 opportunities, while dropping the only chance on his serve. It's hard not to be very disappointed in a defeat like this, when he really should have been able to squeak it out, but the run here could have ended in the last round. In any case, he's now beaten the top two players in the world within the first two months of the year!


Girish Girsh -- The somewhat accelerated tournament schedule continues. He appears to be playing somewhere around the level of a 150-ranked player but moving up through the challenger ranks is difficult. He has managed to establish himself as a solid challenger-level player now though. At a Tier 3 event in Caloundra he made it to the semifinals, losing to Siobhan Doherty(IRE, 41st) who has no real business playing an event this small, but technically still qualifies for it. A few weeks later in Cherbourg, France, he entered a Tier 2 event as there were no smaller ones available in the timeframe except on clay.

Girsh expected to be seeded but a couple of late and unexpected entries had him as an at-large entry and facing the eighth-seed in the first round, who he beat easily. In the quarters he faced anticipated rival and junior #1 from his class Mugur Kinczllers -- and dispatched him in straight sets, a pretty significant upset. Next up was Robert Jerrold, a few weeks older and the junior #4 from the previous year. He wasn't quite as good but Girsh couldn't repeat the magic, falling 6-2, 6-7(5), 6-3. Still, back to back semifinal appearances is a good start to moving up the ladder. He'll have a few weeks off now.


Prakash Mooljee -- A second junior event didn't go as well as his first, he won only one singles match and was bounced in the doubles qualifying. This week he's in Noumea(France) for a third tournament.

Indian Wells Masters

All of the seeds get a bye here and at Miami, and as the 20th among them this is the first time Mehul will benefit from that. Last year's result here was the third round.

R2 -- South Africa's Alex Beamer is one of the better unseeded players, and steamrolled a qualifier in the first round. One previous meeting was a tight three-set win in a challenger at the end of '37. He's a complete hardcourt specialist, but doesn't quite have the all-around game. Mehul jumped on him early with a bagel before seeing the match out in straight sets.

R3 -- Having equaled last year's performance, everything from here on would add to his points total. American Pierce Gaskell is a potential generational rival, with Mehul leading the head-to-head 2-0, both in straight sets. The first was way back in 2034 in a mid-level juniors match, the second last year in the first round of the Olympics. Gaskell has plummeted to 63rd in the rankings, but that's temporary due to some big challenger wins from last year dropping off. It was a much tougher win than the 6-3, 6-2 scoreline indicated. The normally clutch Gaskell may be suffering from confidence issues, as he dropped 11 of 13 break chances. Anil is returning fantastically well so far here, winning more than half of the points on his opponents' serve in both matches so far.

R4 -- Here he was again, a fifth appearance in the round of 16 at a big event in the last few months. Once again the odds were against him, with no. 3 Bjorn Benda waiting. This is of course a reprise of the AO beatdown a couple months ago, and at the same stage. The match started off similarly but Mehul rallied to make a match of it before losing, 6-2, 3-6, 6-2. Benda was best in the important moments(4 of 8 break points versus 1 of 8) but it was more competitive this time around.

As with the Australian, only Hammerstein and Iglar made it to the fourth round among generational rivals, with the Austrian already having upset Topolski in a tight three-set match. Iglar was knocked out in a close match against Alastra(7-5 in the third), while Hammerstein faced the other top Russian, Goncharenko. He was absolutely crushed, taking only three games. So once again, the Iglar/Mehul/Hammerstein trio are bounced at the same stage, none gaining an advantadge.

Elder defeated Prieto in a tight third-set tiebreak to defend his title from last year in the final.


Miami Masters

Mehul is only defending a second-round result this time around, and had an easy match there to at least exceed it.

R3 -- Tough draw for this stage with no. 1 Alastra here. The win against him a few weeks ago indoors was one thing, beating him on the hardcourt was a different matter. Surprisingly, Anil pulled it off again 4-6, 6-2, 7-6(7)! The really surprising part of the match was how well he was able to return against one of the best servers in the sport. This set up a great opportunity ...

R4 -- Back in the round of 16 again with Argentina veteran Gael Graff(31, 16th) awaiting. Graff is a former world no. 2, one of the best to never reach the top spot but he was unfortunate enough to flourish in the latter part of Gorritepe's reign. Still, at his age Mehul was a modest favorite This time out though, Mehul was a little off and didn't return nearly as well, losing 6-4, 6-4. If they played 10 times he's probably win 6 or 7 of them; this is the only real upset he's endured this year and it cost a good opportunity. Incredibly, that's six trips to this stage in large events now without a single win, all in about seven months going back to the Olympics.

Hammerstein had an even more crushing result. He faced off against Hogue in the third round and after dropping the first set led 5-2 in the second, only to lose meekly in a tiebreak after failing to convert eight ... that's right, eight match points! It's pretty much the stuff nightmares are made of. One game from winning a big upset and he couldn't serve it out. The Stars of Tomorrow had more success elsewhere though. Iglar upset Prieto and Almagro in back-to-back matches before losing in the semifinals, while unseeded no. 63 Pierce Gaskell knocked out three seeded players, including no. 10 Alvarez and no. 8 Kucerovic on route to the quarterfinals. Gaskell could well become relevant again now as he moves into the Top 50 again.


Sri Lanka Roundup

With no smaller event available in the needed window, during the second week of Miami Girish Girsh entered his first Tier-1 Challenger in Guadeloupe. He was unseeded again but made it to the quarters before getting flattened by top seed Jens Petersen(Denmark, 56th). He was part of the champion doubles team, getting a total of nine matches in over a few days so he'll have several weeks off now. Mooljee continues to muddle through with his third junior event, getting one singles win and a pair in doubles.

RANKINGS UPDATE

Top Ten

1. Gabriel Alastra(ARG, 29) -- 11,045

Losing to Mehul in the Miami third round took a big chunk out of the cushion he'd built up. Alastra is at his best on the clay though -- how well he does the next couple of months will be a huge factor in whether he stays at the top for a fourth year.

2. Mick Elder(USA, 27) -- 9,825

After closing in on Alastra with back-to-back Masters crowns in Indian Wells and Miami, giving him five for his career, Elder appears to be back in form.

3. Bjorn Benda(DEU, 24) -- 7,880

This is a big stretch upcoming for Benda. His coming-out party was at Roland Garros last year, but overall he was not as successful as Alastra or Elder in the clay season as a whole. If he wants to put his name at the top of the list, the first thing he needs to do is establish himself as the preeminent clay-court player in the world.

4. Perry Hogue(USA, 25) -- 7,500

Hogue is definitely on the rise, but he's not nearly as good on the clay. On the other hand, he doesn't have much in the way of points to defend their either. A fine spring has him in the thick of the second tier behind Alastra and Elder.

5. David Almagro(ESP, 28) -- 7,360

6. David Prieto(ESP, 28) -- 7,200

7. Evgeni Topolski(RUS, 25) -- 5,465

Topolski continues to improve his standing slowly, but is clearly a step behind the top six players still. Since his semifinal run at the Australian Open, he's been fairly unimpressive.

8. Spasoje Kucerovic(SRB, 28) -- 4,120

9. Eric Gorritepe(ESP, 33) -- 3,935

10. David Alvarez(ESP, 26) -- 3,830

Alvarez has been inconsistent since breaking into the Top 10 after Australia, and was knocked out in his first match at Miami. He's an extreme clay-court specialist who will move up significantly if he can avoid such lapses in the coming months.


There will be a ton of competition for the premier clay-court events, with a lot of specialists among the top players and nearly all of them at least seeing this part of the season as a secondary priority. If Benda does well, there could easily be a dogfight for the top spot by the time Wimbledon arrives.


Anil Mehul -- 36th to 20th singles, 291st to 295th doubles. Overall it was a fantastic spring, 18-5 which is almost halfway to last year's 37 wins, some of those coming on the Challenger circuit. The final WTC group play tie against Italy is up next, and then the clay season which will be his first in the bigger events there. Between now and the French Open Mehul only has three events to worry about defending -- and two of them he lost in the first round, getting no points from them. His results won't be as good on the dirt, but he still should be able to add a modest amount to his total and continue to move up a bit. The big question right now is Monte Carlo, the first of the clay masters and the only one which is not mandatory. After wavering back and forth on whether to enter there, he has decided to play only if he is going to be seeded which is still an open question: as of right now he'd be the last seed. If he doesn't play there, it will most likely be Barcelona, a 500 the following week, that serves as a 'bridge' event to stay in match shape before Madrid/Rome leading into the summer slams.

Girish Girsh -- 357th to 207th singles, 1557th to 490th doubles. The story of the spring for Girsh was establishing himself as a challenger player and trying to get his ranking high enough so that practice events stay competitive enough to be useful. He's aiming to qualify at the US Open for his first Slam event in the fall, but until then it'll probably be a steady diet of challengers with the better players at this level still more than a match for him. His development has become even more important with Amrik Chittoor having been picked up by another manager. Unfortunately they are overplaying him, and while he will probably be ok for the upcoming WTC tie he's already a little fatigued, a problem that could well get a lot worse. Sri Lanka's WTC fortunes could suffer for a bit untill Girsh manages to surpass him in the rankings and take his place on the national team. As of now, Chittoor is around his career high at 75th, so it will be some time before that happens. I'm hoping by the end of the year so that 2040 can be entered with a full head of steam.

Anil Manohar -- 442nd to 491st singles, 1417th to 1312th doubles. Results have started to 'even out' for him between singles and doubles a little bit, and that should continue for a while.

Prakash Mooljee -- unranked to 1028th juniors. So far he's winning against the bottom of the barrell competition just a little more often than he's losing, 6-4 in both singles and doubles after three tournaments. Work on the basic fundamentals of baseline play continues, and serve training will follow shortly. At this stage of course training is more important than anything else, tournaments serve mostly to give him a chance to put into practice what he's learning every once in a while so that he's fresh and motivated to continue improving.

Manager Ranking -- As hoped I've seen a small increase in my status, 29th to 25th and 10k to 10.8k in the points.

WTC Level 2 Group 3 Third Round Robin Round
Sri Lanka vs. Italy

Hardcourt was set as the ground for this.

Monday: A. Mehul d. X. Jue, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0
Tuesday: A. Chittoor d. A. El Brazi, 6-0, 6-2, 6-4
Wednesday: X. Jue/A. Lepore d. A. Chittoor/P. Nilima, 6-3, 6-0, 6-2
Thursday: A. Mehul d. A. El Brazi, 6-1, 6-0, 6-2
Friday: A. Chittoor d. X. Jue, 6-1, 6-0, 6-0

Sri Lanka wins 4-1!

Another typical victory, and we move up to a tie for 41st with our larger neighbors across of the Bay of Ceylon, India. All of that was fantastic stuff ... and then we looked at the quarterfinal draw.

Courtesy of a 3-2 loss to Denmark in their last tie, we draw our good friends Austria. Not only that, it's on clay. Again. Any of the other possibilities would have been better. Any other surface would have been better as well. Arglebarglezorz!!!

This time it's actually worse than before, for two reasons. Chittoor's mismanagement means we probably won't be as well prepared for the clash. Also, unlike last year, if we lose it means we don't make the promotion playoffs since it's a quarterfinal tie, not a semifinal. So yeah, it was nice to win the group but as things turned out, we probably would have been better off losing it.

This is great Brian.

Are you a VIP member? Have you ever created your own guy?

Thanks!

Yes, I am VIP(otherwhise I'd only have two players). Mehul, Girsh, and Mooljee are all created players. It's really the only way to build up a nation like Sri Lanka. There are occasional decent players(Chittoor, one of the upcoming juniors that I mentioned in passing) but not nearly enough to challenge the top nations even if they were all managed to perfection.

I forgot to mention one notable milestone. At Indian Wells, Anil Mehul went over the $1 million mark in career earnings at about the time he turned 23. He became the top Sri Lankan in that category earlier in the year, with Prakash Manohari the previous holder at $913k and change. Manohari still holds the mark for wins(660 singles, 287 doubles). Jiten Dhatri has 390 in doubles which is at the top of that list. Mehul is at 319 and 167 but has a similar winning percentage of about .769 -- he's got a couple decades to go so the wins mark will fall in time. A couple of other journeyman-type players are around 400, including Manohar(388).

In terms of titles, nobody really has much to say yet. Mehul is still pursuing his first pro-level(meaning, everything above Challenger, 250s and above) championship. You'd have to go down to the Challengers where Mehul and Chittoor both have three victories. In terms of juniors, Chittoor(15 titles), Girsh(10), and Mehul(9) lead the way, though none of them won any of the big events.

April - May 2039

The first half of the clay season is in the books and the Madrid/Rome Masters are upon us, signifying the beginning of the ramp-up heading into Roland Garros.

Anil Mehul ended up skipping Monte Carlo, which was eventually won by Benda as he beat Elder in the semis and then Alastra in the finals, both in three sets. That trio looks set to be the top powers on clay once again. Mehul entered Barcelona as a 6-seed the following week, losing in the third round in three to no. 36 Cestmir Marcek, the kind of specialist who is only a threat to him on the dirt.

Girish Girsh spent the whole time training, a nearly two-month stretch as he's just outside of the Top 200, around 210-220 most weeks, and he's reached the point where the practice matchups are good enough that I think it's best for him to go back to a minimal tournament schedule. At this point mid-level Challengers(Tier 2) are his sweet spot, but the challenger events are sparse enough that he'll take what he can get. There's a couple of Tier 2s on hardcourt in a couple of weeks so that'll be his next foray.

Prakash Mooljee did not have to qualify for his fifth junior event which was just last week, and compounded that milestone by surprisingly winning the title as the 4-seed! This has propelled him to 746th in the junior rankings, good enough that I'll need to move him into the Tier 4 events now which have the standard 32-draw; the Tier 5's he's been playing have one less round, a 16-draw. I looked into the possibility of amateur events, but even the first-round losers in qualifying are generally far more advanced in their training. He probably won't be ready for those until he is 16 or 17, a couple of years from now if not longer. Going up to the Tier-4s is a modest jump, but the next step to the Tier-3s is much more difficult so he'll probably be staying at this level for a while. He's also reached the point where he has a basic grasp of the fundamentals involved in the different types of rallies that can come up, and will begin to take on developing some semblance of a serve now, the most difficult and important single shot in tennis.

Madrid

Anil Mehul's maiden clay-court Masters was definitely one to forget. He had probably the worst first-round matchup possible, 10-seed Eric Gorritepe. Anywhere else he'd have a decent chance at winning, but not on clay. A competitive but clear straight-set loss sent him packing. It was the first time he'd lost in the first round of anything in nearly a year, but there's nothing to be embarrassed about in losing to the GOAT on their best surface.

Rome

The script flipped here. Mehul won easily against a qualifier, and then had a fairly favorable matchup in the next round against Giorgio Becerril(ARG, no. 14). Becerril is another player that he could probably beat anywhere else, but he's also a clay specialist. Another straight-set loss resulted, 6-4, 6-4. Anil played well enough to have a chance at stealing it, but didn't take any of the five break chances he got and a close defeat resulted. Becerril did go on to make the semifinals, which made him feel a bit better about things.

Despite only winning one match and actually seeing a small net loss in points, Mehul moved up a spot to 19th due to Oberg finally sliding past him on his way down. There was some high drama at the top in Rome. Bjorn Benda won in Monte Carlo and Madrid, but Gabriel Alastra stopped him in an epic final, 7-6(5), 5-7, 7-6(3). It was Alastra's third match of the week to go the distance, and second straight final-set tiebreak after outlasting Elder in the semis. Benda led 5-1 in the first-set breaker, only to drop the next six points and the set, ultimately costing him the match. Despite losing the total points 118-122, Alastra took his 8th Masters shield, but more importantly assured that he'd stay in the #1 position until at least Wimbledon. The heart of the champion was on full display here, staving off the changing of the guard for a little while longer.

Girish Girsh knocked off a couple of seeds in a challenger tournament in Uzbekistan, but it had a disappointing end as he played inexplicably poorly in his last match. A semifinal defeat with only four games won against a player he should have beaten leaves a bad taste in his mouth, but it was enough to crack the Top 200 for the first time.

A week off now, and then it's off to Roland Garros.

Girish Girsh had another challenger, a small one in Luzern, during the interim. He entered there for a second tournament in a row because there is a several-week break beginning with RG where there are no hardcourt challengers until after Wimbledon. This was a tough call, one of those darned-if-you-do, darned-if-you-don't kinds of things where there really isn't a particularly good option. Many other players had the same idea as it had a strong field, but even so he knocked off some higher-ranked guys and made it to the final, where he was stopped short of his first challenger crown by Henry Healey(99th, USA) in one-sided fashion. Still, a strong showing that moved him up to 175th, firmly in the Top 200 to stay.


Roland Garros

Anil Mehul hopes of rescuing an unimpressive clay season were not helped by a relatively unkind draw. He entered as the 17-seed, a bit higher than expected since #6 David Almagro and #7 Evegeni Topolski inexplicably didn't show up. For Topolski, that's two out of three slams missed during what should be the heyday of his career! Criminal mismanagement there. Back to Mehul though:

R1 -- American Chris Kellogg, around 130th in the world, seemed a good draw for the first round until you looked at his resume. Naturally, he was a clay-court specialist though not an extreme one as a fairly balanced player, but certainly a guy who could still be a threat and there are a lot of players who would be easier here. Thankfully there wasn't a lot of drama in a straight-sets win, 6-1, 6-4, 6-2. Meanwhile, Amrik Chittoor nearly got his first win here before losing in five sets to familar WTC foil Guillame Vittoz(Nigeria).

R2 -- Next up was possibly the most dangerous unseeded player in the draw. Also from the US, generational rival Chad Dring, ranked 41st and a complete clay aficianado, had been every bit as impressive in cruising through his first match. Coming into the tournament, Mehul's goal was to defend his position(i.e. make the third round), at which point he would have gone one round better than last year and at least salvaged a decent clay performance on the year. Dring's appearance in his path threatened to throw a wrench in that plan. It was close, but Mehul continued to return very well and after taking a close third he had broken the American's will. The final was 6-4, 4-6, 7-5, 6-1, a fine and important win.

R3 -- And then there was Becerril again. Another step up in competition and they'd just played a couple weeks ago in Rome. This time Anil started better and took the first set, but from there on out the Argentine just got stronger and stronger as it went on. 4-6, 6-4, 6-2, 6-1 was the final, a game effort but on clay there's no question who the better player is.

The top 8 seeds made the quarters, top four made the semis, top two made the final in a rematch of Gabriel Alastra and Bjorn Benda. You can't get much more topheavy than that. There were some close matches in there to be sure, but the powers that be once again defended their territory. Alastra started well in the final, leading by a set and 3-1 before Benda rallied to claim the championship again in four sets. His reward for his second Slam title was to be demoted to #3 in the rankings, as Mick Elder surpassed him by a bit after making the semifinals. The top 5 all equalled or surpassed last year's results, making it a crowded bunch at the top.

All of that makes Wimbledon very interesting in three weeks. Alastra, the four-time defending champion, pretty much needs to repeat again if he wants to retain the top spot for long. With the grass season lasting only a few weeks, there is virtually no such thing as a grass specialist, particularly not to the degree that there is on clay. That makes it a much different playing field and the big servers have a little bit more advantadge there: speed can be a bigger factor as well.

As with most of the top players, Mehul will have one tuneup 250 going in. The big news for the Sri Lanka players though is that it will probably be Girsh's first Slam instead of waiting for the USO. During Roland Garros, he had a difficult time finding quality practice partners -- he's reached a point where many of them were trying to qualify there. It's sort of a catch-22, but he's probably better off trying to do that himself than hitting with guys who can't really challenge him much. Mooljee played his first tier-4 juniors during RG, which was also a mistake: he's high enough to make most of them but this one happened to have a more crowded field and he lost in qualifying. Lesson learned -- it's been a while since I coached up a junior, but I need to get him close to the top 500(around 750th now) before jumping to that level. A couple more good Tier 5 results at least will be needed, which shouldn't take long.

June

Mehul played the UNICEF Open(250) in the Netherlands the week before Wimbledon, and going in as the 2-seed he had hopes for snagging his first title on the main pro tour. Vito Bonamoni of Switzerland, who he'd won a close match against last fall in their own only meeting stopped him in the quarterfinals instead via third-set tiebreak. It was only a moderate upset, but probably his worst loss of the year so far.

Prakash Mooljee was also in action, taking part in a Tier 5 in Prague(singles finalist, doubles quarterfinalist). He'll need another of those before moving up.

WIMBLEDON

Girish Girsh got his introduction to Grand Slam competition as anticipated. He was bounced in the first round of doubles qualifying, but did better in the singles. The biggest obstacle was in the second round, a match he should have lost, but he took advantage of a brief dip by his opponent and pulled through 6-3, 7-6(2). In the main draw, he was matched up against world no. 2 Mick Elder in a hilarious mismatch. The predictable beatdown was by a final of 6-0, 6-2, 6-1, with only five points won on Elder's serve. The success was in reaching the main draw itself though.

Anil Mehul had a qualifier himself first, winning with the loss of only five games. In the second round, Peruvian Arnaldo Barranco waited. They'd played once last year with Mehul winning a close match -- Barranco is a veteran who is still hanging around as a competitive Top 50 player. He was tough early, winning the second and third sets before Mehul rallied to not beat him so much as outlast him, 7-6(2), 4-6, 5-7, 6-4, 6-2. It was Mehul's first five-set match in his career, and allowed him to best last year's result here.

The third round brought a clash with Antonin Iglar, a chance to see how he matched up with the best player of his generation. It was close, but Iglar won it 7-5 in the fifth after another long, epic match. Iglar would go on to beat Julian Hammerstein in five again in the next round, demonstrating how closely matched the three of them are. There will be many more meetings to come, but Antonin won this round.

There were many surprises to come, none greater than four-time defending champion Gabriel Alastra being knocked out in the fourth round by no. 9 Viktor Goncharenko. At the same stage, Elder was also sent home by no. 14 Andres Blanco, while unseeded veteran Jean-Luc Veniard of Monaco joined the quarterfinals as well. After the established powers had impressively flexed their muscles all year long, here at Wimbledon the applecart was completely overturned.

Goncharenko went on to beat Benda in four to reach the final, where he outlasted David Prieto in a classic, ultimately prevailing 8-6 in the fifth. Prior to this event he had never gone further than a quarterfinal at a Slam, and Wimbledon had been his worst of the four the last three years running! He'll have fond memories of this to be sure, his maiden Slam crown at the most prestigious of them all. It certainly sets the stage for what promises to be a fascinating second half of 2039.

TOP TEN RANKINGS UPDATE

1. Bjorn Benda(25, DEU) -- 10,150

Alastra's early exit at Wimbledon allowed Benda, who managed the best of the top players in reaching the semifinals, to claim the #1 spot for the first time just a month after his 25th birthday. His hold on the crown is tenuous, but for now he's reached the top of the mountain.

2. Mick Elder(28, USA) -- 9,785

Elder has been almost but not quite there most of his career and that continues. He won one of the upcoming Masters and the US Open last year, so the best he can realistically aim for is to hold onto his position even if he plays fabulously the next couple of months.

3. Gabriel Alastra(29, ARG) -- 9,385

The question here is can the champ rebound from this disappointment? Is he done at the top, or can he make a surge in the late summer and autumn? He ranks tied for 10th all-time in Slam titles(6) and 9th all-time in weeks at #1(89), and is assured of going into the record books as a second-tier great even if he does nothing else.

4. David Prieto(29, ESP) -- 8,290

Prieto may be inconsistent on the whole, but he's brought his best at the Slams this year(AO champion, FO semifinalist, Wimbledon finalist). Those kind of results ensure that he is not about to fade into the sunset just yet.

5. Perry Hogue(25, USA) -- 8,140

Dropping a spot despite besting last year's result to reach the Wimbledon quarters, Hogue continues to have a fine year but isn't yet the best on any surface. It's a highly competitive group at the top, but he's got a big cushion on the rest of the field.

6. Viktor Goncharenko(26, RUS) -- 5,450

As the flavor of the month, Goncharenko is a big question mark right now. Over a third of his ranking points come from the Wimbledon title he's fresh off of. If he can bring that level of play consistently over the next few months, he could establish himself with the top group, but he's got a lot of ground to gain first. He should be making his first appearance at the WTF, and that's a good place to start.

7. David Almagro(28, ESP) -- 5,180

Almagro was one of the Wimbledon losers, and he hasn't fallen this far in several years. Assuming he doesn't skip the US Open again, there is hope he could still rally.

8. Evgeni Topolski(25, RUS) -- 4,880

A third-round loss to Hammerstein is a far cry from the previous year's semifinal, and after a big year was expected Topolski is a major disappointment right now.

9. Spasoje Kucerovic(29, SRB) -- 3,930

He simply refuses to go away.

10. David Alvarez(26, ESP) -- 3,550

Anil Mehul -- 20th to 17th singles, 295th to 383rd doubles. After an 18-5 start to the year, 11-6 during the clay/grass season was not fantastic. Winning the tough second-rounders at the French and Wimbledon kept it from being a disastrous stretch and he did continue to move up a bit, but no question he's happy to be done with it and back to the hard courts.

Girish Girsh -- 207th to 168th singles, 490th to 435th doubles. Similarly, Girsh moved up slowly as well with qualifying at Wimbledon the unquestioned highlight. He'll continue to claw his way up the challenger ranks, inch by inch.

Prakash Mooljee -- 1028th to 626th juniors. Among the better of the tier-5 competitors, he should make the jump to tier-4 in the third quarter.

Manager Ranking -- 25th to 22nd, 10.8k to 11.6k points. Continuing to gradually climb the ladder.

As for Chittoor, he's up to 54th but has also reached the point where he has been significantly overplayed to the point where it is really starting to adversely affect his performance. Assuming this mismanagement continues, at some point this will cause his ranking to fall but as of right now he's in no danger of being kicked out of the WTC roster.

This seemed a good time to show the ranking breakdown for each player as part of a more detailed explanation of how the system works and the kinds of decisions that can come up. The report in the screenshots here are only available to VIPs but with a bit of time could be hammered out fairly easily from a player's tournament history. The basic concept to keep in mind is that tennis operates on a rolling 52-week system, meaning the rankings are based on all points earned over the past year, and also that points are awarded based on what round you reach. So starting from the bottom up to begin with simplicity, here is Prakash Mooljee.





Most of this is fairly self-explanatory. The column on the left, 'W.L.', stands for 'Weeks Left'. In other words, how long it will be until a result is no longer counted. Naturally this starts at 52 and ends when a full year has passed. Although it isn't stated here, six events each year only count for the junior rankings. Mooljee has gone through the stage of establishing a ranking: at the bottom, one of his results for singles and doubles are listed as 'non-countable' since he's over the six-event limit. Those are disregarded. The best six singles results, and one-quarter of the best-six doubles results, are added together to give his ranking points. 80 + 14 for a total of 94 in this case. At this stage he has to get past the first round in singles(for a JG5) or past the quarterfinals in doubles in order to add to his points total: otherwhise he's just replacing an identical result and his points won't change.


Anil Manohar





On the pro tour, the number of countable results increase from six to what is known as the 'best 18' for singles: 14 for doubles. For most players, like Manohar here, it's simply a matter of adding up all the results from the previous year. Lower-ranking players usually do not play more than 18 tournaments, because practice is more important -- for younger players, developing to become the best they can at peak, and for younger players, working on their skills to become a better trainer since they are no longer good enough to compete at the top anyway.


Girish Girsh






Girsh is pretty much the same, except that we can see Wimbledon is separated out at the top. All Slams and Masters are counted first, and then other events added in up to the 18-result limit. He's starting to reach the point where good futures results will be dropped off, i.e. his win in China in a couple weeks time, and this will slow his rise as will the fact that his tournament schedule will be slowing again now that he's in position to have solid practice partners. He'll probably only be playing one challenger between now and the US Open in a couple months.


Anil Mehul







This, of course, is a lot different. There are a lot more categories, and it looks a lot more complicated, but really isn't overly so. The decisions on what tournaments to play based on this can be however. Every player who finished in the Top 30 the previous year gets a result for all of the Slams and the eight(excluding Monte Carlo) mandatory Masters -- if they don't play, they simply receive 0 points and are additionally banned from one Masters event the following year. So it's basically a really bad idea for a top player not to enter all of them, since they are going to count anyway.

That makes 12 tournaments: the other six are made up of as many as 4 500s and the rest 250s or challengers if the player was low enough to qualify. Anybody in the Top 32 at the time of entry cannot play a challenger event.

The upshot of all of this is that at the elite level, the only way to move up significantly is to do better in the Slams/Masters: there are a lot more points available there than in the smaller events. Mehul has a couple of 'extras' at the bottom: the UNICEF result will probably replace that last challenger in Sopot when it drops off in a couple of weeks. WTC success has been a nice boon, and even more-so earlier in his career: there was a point, when pushing through the lower ranks, when it was 200 of less than 500 points, or nearly half of his total. Continuing the trend towards slightly better and more consistent results this year will help, but the 'wall' that has seemingly been erected against Mehul at the Round of 16 will need to be consistently breached if he is to threaten the Top 10.

At this point his goal is to get securely into the Top 16(for better seeding) as soon as possible, and after that climb as close to the Top 10 as possible by the end of the year. For reference, here's how the spots around him look:

14. Oliver Challenger(29, USA) -- 2495
15. Giorgio Becerril(29, ARG) -- 2455
16. Isaac Malpica(29, ESP) -- 2050
17. Anil Mehul(23, SRL) -- 1905
18. Gael Graff(31, ARG) -- 1885
19. Strahinja Kecic(27, CRO) -- 1880
20. Julian Hammerstein(23, AUT) -- 1840
21. Lubos Nedved(26, CZE) -- 1695

It's very competitive and fluid, and over the last couple months Mehul has moved up more due to players like Kecic and Graff sliding than anything great that he's done. There are four masters left in the year(three hardcourt, one indoor) and getting seeded there will be a major boon in him getting consistently solid or better results. Right now though, he's the first man out which would mean he could face any of the top players in an early round. He'll need to play either Atlanta(250) or Washington(500) and probably both ahead of the Canada Masters a month from now. The uncertainty in whether he'll be in or out of the seeded positions at that time makes planning the tournament schedule a guessing game at best. The situation will be shifting on a weekly basis. In the long view, the upcoming schedule is absolutely vital: those two events followed by Canada/Cincinatti Masters back-to-back, then a week off followed by the US Open, and the week after that the WTC QF tie against Austria. It's a lot to pack in less than two months, which is one reason why he's had a little more rest over the spring and summer. Much will be determined in the coming weeks.

Somehow I missed that the junior rankings are based on so few tournaments. Now I know why my guys have plateaued around #20 even as they win more JG2s. Thanks!

You're welcome :). At a certain point due to the small number of events it gets really hard for juniors to move up in the rankings. You pretty much have to go far in the A or Slam events.

JULY/AUGUST

Mehul started in Atlanta(250) as the top seed, proceeding to get upset in the quarterfinals by Pierce Gaskell 3 and 3, the first time he's lost in four meetings. Overall, it was as bad as any loss this year and continued the trend of slumping that he's been in for a while. The next week in Washington(500) was better at least. He looked good in the early rounds, knocking Mockler aside in the quarters and losing only to champion Perry Hogue in the semis, 6-4, 6-2. The rising world no. 4 beat him by the same score earlier in the year. There's no shame in losing this kind of match, it's losing to lower-ranked players that is problematic. Heading into the first of the two pre-USO Masters, it was touch and go whether he'd be seeded or not but Mehul is ranked 16th, just on the inside at the moment.

Meanwhile, Girish Girsh is preparing for a Tier-1 challenger in Beijing, his first tournament since Wimbledon and a good opportunity to grab some points with four hardcourt challengers in the same week. Prakash Mooljee did not overwhelm in two events in Jerusalem and Sfax. He won only one singles match between the two, did ok in doubles, but is still hovering around the 600 mark in the rankings. Both losses were to better players, unusually good for this level. It's off to Egypt for him next week for his latest foray, still in the junior fifth tier and there he'll stay until he manages another good run.

CANADA MASTERS

Going in, there was a tie for the 16th seed between Anil Mehul and Julian Hammerstein. Hammerstein had just made the final at Washington to bridge a significant gap. I don't know if it was because of some tiebreaker or if the seedings were determined the week before, but Mehul got the spot -- and it didn't matter at all. Why? Because they were matched up in the first round! Literally, this was the worst possible first-round opponent he could draw. Since Hammerstein had more to gain and less to lose, having not played as many events and not most of the masters the previous year, Mehul needed to win this to have any chance of gaining the upper hand soon.

It was a tough, tense match as they tend to be between these two, and came down to the key moments. As he usually is, Hammerstein was best in those moments and won it 7-5, 6-4. He was 3-for-7 on break chances, Mehul 1-for-8. Having broken back to 5-all to stay in the first set, Mehul dropped the last two games. Later in the second, he had triple break point with Hammerstein serving at 1-2, and failed to convert any of them. Those two moments pretty much sealed this. It's the first time he's lost in the first round of a hard-court masters in almost two years.

The other Sri Lankans did better. Girish Girsh made the semifinals of the Beijing challenger, losing a close match to George Craighead(no. 61), 6-4, 7-6(4). A fine showing for him. Prakash Mooljee got his second tier-5 juniors title, moving him up to just inside the Top 500 and allowing him to finally break free. He'll have about a month off before heading into regular Tier-4 competition.


CINCINATTI MASTERS

Spasoje Kucerovic, the ninth seed, was the first obstacle this week and both of their previous matches have been tight with one going each way. That wasn't the case here, with Mehul dropping just five games in one of his more impressive matches of the year. He'd had a long week to contemplate the disappointment in Canada, and used it well. In the second round, he dropped only a single game in a very impressive display, giving him what was now his 7th chance in the round of 16 at a big event. The foe was certainly worthy of the occasion, Mick Elder. Unfortunately the seventh time was not the charm, Elder flattened him 6-2, 6-3. He's been playing very well lately, unlike early in the year at Brisbane when Mehul defeated him for the first time.

Neither loss was really a bad one, though both a little disappointing especially in not putting up more of a fight against Elder. He lost to better players both times, and got enough matches in to be ready for what will hopefully be a good run at the US Open. The goal of getting inside the Top 16 is still not realized however.

On the larger scene, Cincinatti was a coming-out party for Antonin Iglar. He beat Benda ... and then Goncharenko ... and then Prieto ... and then Elder in the final. The last pair of matches weren't even close. It's one of the most impressive things I've seen in a long time. Iglar's title is of course his first Masters Shield, and he moves up to #9 in the world, a legitimate member of the elite now and candidate for the World Tour Finals in a few months. He is still about three months shy of his 23rd birthday. By comparison, Gabriel Alastra took about another year to reach this level of achievement, though the all-time greats like Gorritepe, Sullivan, etc. got there a year or so quicker. Still, for a 22-year-old to breach the Top 10 is not something that happens often. Once a decade maybe at most. Nobody will be interested in seeing Antonin Iglar in their draw at the US Open, that much is certain.

After a week off, the focus of the tennis world will switch to Flushing Meadows. Girsh will try to back up his qualifying effort at Wimbledon by doing it again, and Mehul will attempt to improve on last year's third-round effort.

US OPEN

Girish Girsh made the final round of qualifying without incident, then edged past journeyman Jaromir Simunek, 6-2, 1-6, 6-4. Having succeeding in his goal, he met the best, by far, up-and-coming player in the world in the main draw: Spain's Marcel Bahana, already seeded here at 20 years old. He did manage to get one break but still lost in straight sets, 6-2, 6-2, 7-6(3).

Anil Mehul cruised through his first pair of matches, dropping only five games in each. Eric Gorritepe, who has already effectively given up on his singles career and is focused on trainer preparation after dropping out of the Top 10, was next up. Gorritepe held a 2-1 edge including a win earlier in the year, but this time it was all Mehul, a competitive match but straight sets.

Fourth Round -- On to the Round of 16. Again. 8th time in a little over a year. The foe was Mick Elder who is the defending champ and had certainly taught him a lesson a couple weeks ago in Cincinatti. All signs pointed to the same result here; but Mehul won a tense tiebreak in the opener and went on to take the upset in four! A huge, huge win, his second over Elder and finally he has broken through the wall.

Quarterfinals -- Pierce Gaskell was a surprise to see here, but he's on the rise as well and had nearly as impressive a fourth-round win, knocking off Goncharenko. They'd last played a little over a month ago in Atlanta, Mehul's only loss to Gaskell and one of his worst defeats of the year. This one went a little different; Anil dominated the match, 6-3, 6-3, 6-2.

Semifinals -- The last four at a Slam; certainly this was not expected coming in. Opposing him was the flavor of the month, Antonin Iglar. Iglar had knocked Mehul out of Wimbledon at a much earlier stage, then followed up his masters win in Cincinatti by crushing Prieto and then rallying to beat Topolski in a good four-setter. He was the favorite here as well but another upset was not out of the question. Iglar is on a mission though and prevailed 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 7-6(2). Mehul could take solace in the fact that nobody played him any tougher here.

In the other semifinal, Perry Hogue clinched the #1 spot for the first time by defeating Almagro. He was beaten in straights though in the final by Iglar, who snagged his first Grand Slam title and has now won his last 12 matches to surge past a number of players far more experienced. He's more vulnerable on other surfaces, but there's no doubt that right know Iglar is the best hardcourt player in the world.

As for Mehul this is a mammoth result. He increased his career winnings by over 20% by taking home over 350k, and leapfrogged past Hammerstein to convincingly take his place in the Top 16. The win over Elder was the big one, the others he should have won but did so convincingly, and gave Iglar a fairly tough match as well. This is the breakthrough he's been waiting for over a year now -- can he build on it?

Elsewhere, Mooljee's first Tier-4 event in Boston resulted in second-round exits both in singles and doubles. He'll go back to tier-5 for at least one more tournament, perhaps vacillating back and forth for a bit yet.

TOP TEN RANKINGS UPDATE

1. Perry Hogue(25, USA) -- 9,060

The derisions of Hogue as a 'slamless #1' have now begun, as he jumps from 5th and a career-best of 4th to the top spot here. As a finalist at the Australian and United States Slams this year, his bona fides are well-established.

2. Bjorn Benda(25, DEU) -- 8,870

A quarterfinal loss knocks him from the perch he earned over the spring and summer, but not by much.

3. Gabriel Alastra(29, ARG) -- 8,775

Don't count him out for the year-end crown just yet. There's a lot of tennis left to be played.

4. David Prieto(29, ESP) -- 8,660

5. Mick Elder(28, USA) -- 7,665

Elder was back at #1 for a week in the late summer, and now tumbles from second to fifth thanks to the loss to Mehul.

6. Antonin Iglar(22, CZE) -- 6,010

You can pencil in Iglar for the World Tour Finals, where he'll attempt to show that the new kid on the block can succeed on other surfaces. For now though, he's unquestionably joined the elite and will be a force to reckon with for years to come.

7. David Almagro(28, ESP) -- 5,600

8. Viktor Goncharenko(26, RUS) -- 5,510

Goncharenko has been decent since winning at Wimbledon, but hasn't done enough in the current topsy-turvy climate and drops a couple of places.

9. Evgeni Topolski(25, RUS) -- 4,695

Topolski needs more consistency to make any kind of serious run at the top places.

10. Spasoje Kucerovic(29, SRB) -- 3,570

Still hanging on by the skin of his teeth.



Any of the Top 5 still has a very legitimate shot at the year-end #1. The first four have barely a sheet of paper between them in the rankings, which will change almost week to week now. Hogue and Benda could have an interesting but very unbalanced rivalry going on, each dominant on their own turf. Iglar is just as big a story, making really all six players involved in compelling stories of their own as the season enters it's final act.

SRI LANKA RANKINGS UPDATE

Anil Mehul -- 17th to 15th singles, 383rd to 381st doubles. An 11-5 mark brings him to 40 wins, already better than last year's 37 and there's still several events to go. The breakout semifinal at the USO puts him solidly in the Top 16, and the rest of the year will be about getting set up for the offseason and getting as close to the Top 10, the next goal, as he can by the end of the year.

Girish Girsh -- 168th to 152nd singles, 435th to 438th doubles. Nearly stagnant the last couple months, Girsh did qualify for the last two Slams but at this point is essentially replacing 20-25 point results(good futures tournaments from last year) with 35-point results(GS qualifying, semis in challengers). It is still the case that until he starts getting some challenger titles, it'll be slow progress. I think he's close to breaking through, but not quite there yet.

Prakash Mooljee -- 626th to 475th juniors. Right now the limiting factor as much as anything is physical maturation. Mooljee doesn't have the endurance to play a lot of matches in a week. At his age, a more important measuring stick than ranking is looking at how many players younger than him are ranked ahead, which I'll look at in more detail at the end of the year but he's doing pretty good there.

Manager's Ranking -- 22nd to 21st, 11.6k to 12.3k, a lot of that due to Mehul's USO SF.


Being played out as I write this is the WTC quarterfinal tie against Austria. Much will be determined there, and a month after that the asian swing picks up steam with the Shanghai Masters.

World Team Cup Level 2 Quarterfinals
Sri Lanka vs. Austria, Clay

Monday: A. Mehul d. H. Frankl, 6-1, 6-2, 6-3
Tuesday: J. Hammerstein d. A. Chittoor, 6-1, 6-1, 6-1
Wednesday: J. Hammerstein/T. Weidman d. P. NIlima/A. Chittoor, 6-2, 6-1, 6-4
Thursday: J. Hammerstein d. A. Mehul, 7-5, 6-0, 7-6(5)
Friday: H. Frankl d. A. Chittoor, 6-4, 6-1, 6-3

Austria defeats Sri Lanka 4-1. A disappointing but hardly unexpected result. We've now lost twice in 'my' tenure and both of them to Austria, who will be in the playoff to go up to Group 1 next year while we will not. Unlike last year we were defeated in doubles, Chittoor has been mismanaged this year as previously mentioned but also Prakash Nilima, the consistent cog in doubles through all of our WTC runs, is now 31 and not nearly the player he once was. Mehul won his first match but had one disastrous set against Hammerstein and was only 4 of 18 on break chances. It was still better than he managed last year and wouldn't have been enough to salvage the tie anyway, but still a disappointment.

Sri Lanka drops one spot to 42nd in the world. Anil Mehul will have a busy schedule now the next couple of months as with no WTC action until next year, he'll need to get a lot of matches in order to support training during the off-season. For him, the off-season this year will be nearly two months, everything after the Paris Masters. Next year we will try again to fight for promotion, and it's very possible it will be without Austria in our path. That wouldn't bother me one bit.

September

The first week of the 'big finish' came at the Japan Open(500) for Anil Mehul. In order to sustain training effectiveness over what will now be a seven-week offseason for him due to the unpleasantness in the WTC recently, he'll need to play at least four events in five weeks, possibly five straight depending on how they go. Most will probably involve doubles as well. By the end of the Paris Masters in November, he'll need to have overplayed a fair amount. This will probably hurt his results a bit but that isn't as important as going into next year with a full head of steam.

After a couple of easy rounds, he had competitive wins over Kecic and Gaskell to reach the final. Julian Hammerstein, who had just eked out an upset over Benda in the other semifinal, waited there. Another close one was expected, but in this case Mehul took it to his rival with a surprisingly easy 6-3, 6-4 win that saw him lose just a dozen points on serve and fail to suffer a single break chance! This was the fifth meeting between the two, the first coming just over a year ago, and Mehul has now won two and dropped three, 2-1 on hardcourt, winless in two chances on clay both in the WTC.

With the win, he moved up to 13th ahead of the Shanghai Masters, leaping declining veterans Becceril and the incomparable Gorritepe. More than that, it was the first professional tournament title ever for a player from Sri Lanka, a real piece of history, and will certainly serve to offset the points he's going to lose from last year's WTC run. A fine way to back up his USO run and get back on track -- he's looking good heading into the end of the year.

There were good results elsewhere also. Girsh Girsh was in Recife for a small challenger the same week, and he proceeded to brush aside former conqueror Joseph Skirrow 3 and 3 in the final to claim his first challenger-level title and move up to 125th! Skirrow has not been managed as well, and Girsh has legitimately at least equaled him after it looked a year or so ago as if Skirrow would be a major force in his generation. This is a great example of how talent alone can't win by itself -- the right kind of work and training, intelligently pursued, is also required. Skirrow is still a somewhat better athlete, more on Mehul's level in that regard, but Girsh has clearly surpassed him technically.

Prakash Mooljee seems to have played his last tier-5. Yes, I've said that before, but he rattled off another title, aided no doubt by the fact that the event was played in Colombo. It's rare to have a chance to play in front of a Sri Lankan crowd and pretty much only happens in juniors. With the win he's just inside the Top 400 now in juniors and should be seeded in all tier-4 events, allowing him to consistently progress well into the draws. We'll see how that actually plays out.

Titles for all three of the players that are still developing in the same week, a very fine thing to celebrate as we move towards the end of another season. On to Shanghai, where the big question is: can anyone derail the Antonin Iglar express?

Shanghai Masters

Mehul was the 11th-seed here and had a surprisingly tough first pair of matches. In the second round, he barely escaped 40th-ranked Olav Birkeland of Sweden, 6-4, 6-7(4), 7-6(4). Birkeland actually outpointed him 117-112 and he would have had little to complain about had he lost. That set up a match against Viktor Goncharenko, which was close as their last meeting had been but Goncharenko won it 7-5 in the fifth for his third win in as many encounters between the two. Again it could have gone either way.


Normally this would be mildly disappointing, but Mehul has played a lot of matches the last couple of weeks; he qualified in doubles which was unexpected and is a bit overplayed at this point. At his best, maybe he wins that encounter. Regardless, he got enough in that he'll be able to take a week off before the last two tournaments of the season for him, and a third-round finish equals his performance here last year so at least there's nothing lost. There's a two-week gap, then the Paris Masters will end the year for most of the top players.

I'm having an interesting time with my group of 18-22 year olds--I can get their skill/service developed into 4+/3+ territory, and make them competitive in challenger-level events, but I'm having trouble getting them inside the Top 200. It could be because I enter them in the GSL and Masters events, which take up slots in their rankings formula.

Multiple things could be going on there. I would advise that it is not best to enter players into Masters or GSL that early. I don't enter Masters until players are at least into the Top 100 and higher than that for most of them; Top 150 approx. for Slams. If a player isn't ranked that high then even if they qualify they aren't getting anywhere in the main draw and it's counterproductive I think.

If you want to post a screenshot or a little more detail on the players(with skill/serve/strength/speed/mentality scores) I can give you a bit of feedback on about where they should be ranked and what events I would be playing them in if I was managing them. It all depends on how good they are, really.

Here's my stable of guys in two different game worlds.

Thanks. I think you have a group of good-but-not great players objectively, with endurance being the main limitation. I think endurance is the single most important attribute, as it allows you to train them more. YMMV but as a general rule I don't play them there until they can benefit from it(Top 150 for Slams, Top 100 for Indian Wells/Miami, Top 50-60 for other Masters). If they don't have an excellent chance of making it through qualifying, it's a waste of time in my opinion.

It might be related, but I would also suggest less tournaments and more practice overall. You appear to be doing an excellent job at keeping them out of the 'red zone' in terms of form, but until a player reaches about the Top 50 -- at which point they should be playing all Slams/Masters or at least most of them -- I think this is still overplaying. Development first again. Anybody else, as a general rule, shouldn't be playing in a tournament the following week unless it is necessary to avoid the form penalty by going under 15.0. More specificially, for challenger players:

** The last challenger is in week 48 and the first one in the new year is in week 2. In order to 'bridge the gap', by the end of week 48, you need to be up to about 25 form or just a hair under. This is exactly the situation in which Girsh finds himself in RR1 for my players, he's a bit higher ranked than your guys but not much and still very much a challenger player. Week 44 just ended, he'll need to play in week 46 to stay out of the 'red zone' and at least once more in 47-48, maybe both weeks to get up there where he needs to be. Note that for juniors/futures players this isn't necessary since they have year-round options.

** Since form declines by percentage(8% decrease each week), the higher it is, the faster it goes down. Combine that with the fact that there's always a chance you lose early in a tournament and are forced into practice events to use up your fatigue for the week, and it's best for development to play less tournaments.

** It's always good to look for opportunities where there are a lot of challengers in a week and you can 'play up' a level and still have a chance to go deep in the draw. A couple of your higher-ranked guys might be able to get away with a CH1 once in a great while but only if there are multiple CH+ events that week, etc.

** To stay above the 15-form line, all you need is to have 16.3 or more the previous week. So, if you aren't below 16.3, most of the time you shouldn't be entering another tournament the next week. Practice, practice, practice(with no apologies whatsoever to Allen Iverson)

Player-Specific Suggestions

If I were you(I'm not, have fun with the game whatever you decide), this is what I would personally do.

** All four should be playing CH3's primarily, and on surfaces they are at least decent on(appears to be hardcourts will be best in most circumstances, but again this a week-to-week thing depending on what tournaments are available). You are doing it exactly right by playing both doubles and singles, the idea is to get in as many matches as possible, take whatever points you can get, and then take as long of a break as you can for practice tournaments to build up your abilities -- lather, rinse, repeat.

** I would drop Delacave like a bad habit. Probably about 100th is the best he's going to get. I'd do the same with Bollom, although he's better, and then you have a gap between your two players in each world. Hansell I like the best. He's got almost everything you want except for strength. I'd be surprised if you can't turn him into a Top 30 player. Kazic probably Top 50(just ballpark stuff here, depending on their aging factors, etc.). None of them are Slam-champion guys but you can have a lot of fun with them while replacing the other two. That'd be my call anyway.

Not necessarily immediately, but I'd be scouring the new juniors every Monday looking for a new player. To find them, remember that endurance is far more important than talent. The difference between a below-average(Manohar, 2.0) and elite(Mooljee, 4.7) player in talent is only 11 xp points per week. That works out to less than 10k over the course of their productive career, or 2-3 extra training sessions. It's not nothing, but it's close to it. Endurance is several times more important -- a similar gap there would mean 150-200 xp points a week, roughly 15x as much. Anybody who doesn't have at least a 1.4 endurance when they come in is somebody you want to ignore. I think second-most important is athleticism(strength/speed) and mentality. Since you can't train those abilities, they either have them or they don't.

So looking at the new players, I'd do a quick calculation of their peak endurance/speed/strength, look at mentality/talent which doesn't change, and then if you have players who are close how developed their skills are will also matter. Surfaces/Home Advantage can safely be ignored. Might be useful here to illustrate a couple of RR1 examples:

** Brad Bennett(USA, 14y 29w, 67% aged). Until I decided to do this I hadn't seen him, and my jaw figuratively hit the floor. He's not 'sexy', doesn't have that uber-talent that just makes you amazed, but he has the following:

Skill: 0.6
Service: 0.3
Doubles: 0.1
Talent: 2.8*
Strength: 2.3
Speed: 1.8
Mentality: 2.3
Endurance: 2.1!!!

I don't hire anybody not from Sri Lanka, but if I did I'd be on this guy like yesterday. I want to slap 95% of the managers in RR1 right this very minute, because no way should he be available. Talent is just a bit above average there nothing exciting, mentality a bit below average so he's not particularly clutch. But if we do the math, at peak he will have:

Strength: 3.4(good)
Speed: 2.7(a hair over average)
Endurance: 4.7

That's better endurance than any of my players and I specifically emphasize it when they are created. Athleticism is almost as good as Mehul/Mooljee. Properly trained, he'll have a fairly meteoric career but probably be better at his peak than anybody I have. He'll at least be as good. Should be a Top 10 player, and he's just sitting there waiting to be snapped up :). He's been around for almost six months so some of that potential is already wasted, but still ... you don't get youngsters with that kind of endurance very often.


** Greg Sanderson(AUS, 14y 26w, 64% aged)

3.8 talent, 1.8 endurance, 2.4 strength, 2.2 speed, 1.3 mentality.

Well the mentality sucks here and he's going to lose to anybody close to him in ability, but having said that endurance will end up at a very fine 4.4, 3.8 strength, 3.4 speed which is better athleticism than anyone I've gotten. Again, I'd be snapping him up in a second.

To find these guys, what I did is to simply sort the list of available 14yo by endurance. Then I just looked through to find guys who were high on there and had a decent mix of the other abilities, taking a closer look at any who catch my eye. There's no question you can do at least somewhat better than what you have, it takes some patience to train them up of course.

Any questions?

Wow. What a masterclass!

I will admit that I went in with my 150 starter points in each world and took this approach: spend 60 on the most talented and well-rounded 14yo I could find (Kazic/Hansell), then spend the other 90 on a ~16yo that would be a little ahead in developmental terms so I had a better idea of how to develop the 14yos. At this point, we both see that the younger guys have essentially caught up to the elder guys and have brighter career arcs.

To this point, I've been chasing XP through practice tournaments and friendlies after early tourney exits. Are either of the older guys worth turning into a trainer, seeing that I have none? I could spend a little time building up their doubles skills (which is very cheap to do) and reap the 1/3 multiplier in the trainer rating formula. In any case, they're in the neighborhood of 3.0 trainers.

I've really enjoyed seeing Kazic progress in the context of other Serbian players. That, combined with this dynasty (thanks again for turning me and others on to this!), is pushing me toward focusing on a smaller nation or two and seeing what I can do there.

I will gladly accept your advice on the importance of endurance. Your post made me dive back into the help section on player info. I see now where you can read between the lines on the relative importance of endurance to talent--endurance allows you to train more, whereas talent is just a relatively small natural boost to the process. And I also can make sense of the progression of a player's athleticism with the aging factor in play--that's a key detail I had missed before.

Thanks again for sharing your wisdom! I'll try to make sure that Kazic and Hansell have bright days ahead of them.

Uh, better thought. I should probably spend a bunch of the points I have to hire players on a veteran who's very skilled, and make that guy a trainer.

You're welcome, and I'm glad I was able to help(particular since we aren't competing in the same game world, although I've been toying with the idea of joining a second one ... ).

Anyway, your last post has the best idea. If you want to stick with the game longterm which it certainly appears that you do, yes get a trainer. You can't max a player out in terms of their potential without it. Dump the weaker pair of players, get an experienced one in their place that you can make into a decent trainer quickly, then after you do that you can replace them with a younger talent, etc.

A 3.0 trainer is of minimal benefit, but you should be able to find much better. To do so, if you look at the oldest age bracket(27+) and leave the sort on Cost, look for guys who are at least in their mid-30s on the first couple or few pages of that. That should give you some idea of what kind of players are available. The younger ones who are available are probably not going to be very good, require more work, etc. Anil Manohar is a great example from my game. I don't talk about him much because he's simply training and playing FT3s(exciting stuff, that :P). But his career best ranking is 238th, I didn't pick him up until midway through his career, and he literally didn't play at all in juniors or early in his pro career, was never hired by another manager, so he blew a lot of his potential out the window. And he's over a 4.1 trainer equivalent right now with several more years of training available. The higher you go the harder it gets to improve -- he's near the end of the point where doubles training is best(at about 3.6 there) and will be switching to service/doubles alternating soon, but the point is he'd be a solid trainer right now and has been screwed up/undeveloped for a large part of his career and wasn't that talented to begin with(1.3 endurance right now, a pedestrian 2.9 at his apex).

I found a guy near the top of the list who is 36y28w, 68% aging(on the downslope here of course, basically the same as an early junior but on the opposite end of the career). 4.3 skill, 3.5 serve, 5.0 doubles. By my calculations(remembering that doubles doesn't suffer the aging decline that the others do), if he just saved the xp payment required to be a trainer and cashed it in right away with no more training he'd be a 5.0 trainer right now! It's rare to find players that good, he already has service and doubles maxed out and was dumped a few months ago by a manager who has ... only a 4.7 trainer. Why??? But I digress. Finding players who can be turned into a 4.5 trainer or higher quickly is pretty easy in my game world and so I'd assume probably would be for you as well. The difference between a 4.5 and a 5.0 is still something, but a lot closer than either of us are right now and getting a couple of them in pretty quickly would help Kazic/Tanner develop and give you some experience with the process. Or you could be a little more patient and spend a few years getting a player all the way up to maximum before retiring them as a trainer. Either way you'd be set to max or near-max your next 'youth project', and then now with some more experience with the game would have a much better chance of really making them great.

One more point in this excessively long-winded post about margins at the top. Another thing you could check in your world of course, but here's how my uni sits:

#1(Bjorn Benda) -- 5.0 skill, 4.1 serve, 3.9 str, 3.3 spd, 3.6 ment

#10(David Alvarez) -- 4.9 skill, 4.0 serve, 2.8 str, 3.6 spd, 3.7 ment

#20(Oliver Challenger) -- 4.5 skill, 4.0 serve, 3.7 str, 3.1 spd, 3.9 ment

Challenger actually understates the situation because he's falling like a sinking ship and isn't playing like the #20 player in the world anymore. But look at the difference between Benda and Alvarez. A pretty small athleticism and virtually non-existent technical gap. The difference between 'great' and 'excellent' is miniscule(Benda has won 86% of his matches on the season, Alvarez 80% but the rankings points gap is nearly three to one) -- and by the way the next couple of generations of players look to be even more competitive. Raising a champion is about creating, via proper management, miniscule advantages over your opponent.

I read a study about the recently ended real-life 'reign of terror' by Rafael Nadal at the French Open. While dominating the event for a decade, he proceeded to lose 44% of the points he played(including the early-round matches against players he could thrash with his eyes closed practically). Winning another half-percent of points is an enormous advantage in tennis, and thinking about this as I've developed a strategy for RR over time has really focused me on maximizing. Proper management, the gaining of very small bonuses over time, has a monstrous cumulative effect.

Getting a trainer, followed by a new carefully chosen youth player, would let you reach much greater heights -- no question about it. Good luck!

On the endurance vs. talent thing: I just realized that I overstated the case, my brain wasn't working properly and I miscalculated with the example I used. I'll post something more accurate when I'm not tired :P. The essential point is still correct, endurance is significantly more important than talent but not to the degree I stated.

*slap self*

Some surprising stuff happening in the Paris Masters as this year winds down in my universe. How is that for a flagrant and completely unjustified cliffhanger?

Ok, last wall of text post(I think) on the strategy/analytics side:


Bolded is the key. 11xp per day, not per week. That's still not as much as you can get from a high endurance. It should also be noted that talent never changes over the course of your career, while endurance is low for young/old players so you don't get the full advantage of it except for a few years in your early 20s. It's still more important, but maybe 2x or a little less as compared to talent. so I'd prioritize this way in choosing a youngster that will have a bright future:

1. Endurance
2. Talent
3. Mentality(due to the small tolerances between good and great players at the high end)
4. Athleticism(speed/strength)
5. Skill/Service(much less important than the others since there's not all that much variance here and training is quick for a young player).

October

A couple updates to get caught up on. I forgot to include the conclusion of Shanghai, in which Benda took possession of the driver's seat for year-end #1 by winning tight matches against Almagro and Elder to take his first big title off of clay. Meanwhile, Iglar was a shocking third-round upset, ending his run of hardcourt dominance for the moment.

Mehul headed off to the Valencia Open(500) in Spain the week before Paris, and got himself through a tight final-set tiebreak against Isaac Malpica(10-8) before losing to David Prieto 7-5, 7-6(2) in the semifinals. Objectively he's better than Prieto but he's overplayed to get set up for the offseason as mentioned.

Prakash Mooljee went off to a Tier-4 in Nova Gorica(Slovenia), and I was shocked that he wasn't seeded there! Junior events are so much harder to predict but there were a lot more top players at this one. He was smacked down 6-3, 6-0 in the first round although he did make the semis in doubles. Still, one thing that is becoming obvious is that I still have some to learn about training juniors players and getting them into the right events.


Paris Masters

For Anil Mehul, it was an unexpected and even undesired success here. Singles went as you might expect for a tired player, although he coincidentally had the same matchups as in Shanghai. First-round bye, beat Malpica easily this time(2 & 0!) and then lost to Prieto in the third round, again in straight sets. But in doubles, he qualified ... and just kept winning, knocking out the first and seventh-seeded teams along with partner Hugo Sanchez(MEX) en route to the semifinals! At most I figured a first-round loss, if he got through qualifying. It's better than the alternative of underplaying, but he's now really tired and will suffer a bit for it in his first week of the off-season which begins now. He moves up to a personal and Sri Lanka historical best 100th in doubles, fairly irrelevant but there it is. It looks like he'll finish the year at a career-high 12th in singles, with a 52-20 mark on the year(last season was 37-17 against somewhat diminished competition). He's turned the corner, and will now spend the next several weeks preparing for a determined charge against the best in the world next year.

At the business end of things, Bjorn Benda ran the table once again and you can pretty much pencil him in now as the #1 to end 2039. Iglar in the quarters gave him a battle and Goncharenko in the final pushed him to three sets, but with back-to-back Masters crowns off his favored clay, Benda pushes his total to four Masters shields, all this year, and has shown he has enough of a well-rounded game to be a force anywhere. The gauntlet has been laid down, and from the chaotic competition of the last few months a clear champion has emerged. The German is a step above all comers right now.


World Tour Finals Preview

So in three weeks time the best will meet to confirm Bjorn Benda as champion. He has a lead of well over a thousand points now, and the only way he doesn't finish the year on top is if he loses all his matches and David Prieto wins all of his and takes the title. Prieto has only made it out of group play here once(he won it three years ago) and didn't take a single match last year. That just plain isn't going to happen.

Perry Hogue's moment in the sun appears to have lasted about a year, he's faded the last few months and the general consensus is that it was the best the tennis world will ever see from him. As last year's runner-up, he has to do well to even maintain contact with the other top players. The stakes are even higher for Gabriel Alastra, who after being #1 the last three years and taking the title here last year, will enter play seventh in the field. While his counterparts Prieto, Elder, and Almagro are still here as well, this is the last hurrah for them as a major force. The sun is setting.

Benda and Hogue will be joined by first-timer Viktor Goncharenko as a third member of what is now ostensibly the ruling class, though it'd be more accurate to say Benda rules over a hodgepodge as Goncharenko has been inconsistent since Wimbledon and Hogue is apparently on the decline now. Antonin Iglar, just past his 23rd birthday, will look to make a statement as he represents the next generation that is increasingly making it's presence felt.

The main drama here will be in how 2-4(Prieto/Elder/Hogue) and 5-7(Goncharenko/Iglar/Alastra) shake out. Anybody in the second trio could move up a few spots with a great performance, but it really all boils down to the fact that everyone's chasing Benda.

With Goncharenko and Iglar joining, two players from last year will not be returning. Spasoje Kucerovic has given up the singles game to focus on doubles as of late in the year, tumbling well out of the Top 10. Far more disappointing is the case of Evgeni Topolski. The Russian, barely 26, finishes the year just out of the field and really should be in it -- he's been a major disappointment this season and unquestionably a waste. 2039 and 2040 should be his best two years, the peak of his abilities, and it's clear that without a major recommitment to the game he'll have to be regarded as an underachiever. .

*steals strategy info*

Good luck Izulde! I wonder what world(s) you are in if you care to share?

I decided just to be difficult to jump into #2 and compete there -- chose that one because it's the one with the most people. I will say that the fast pace is already driving me nuts and it's also clear that, as would make sense, it's more difficult to find quality players(455 managers in that one, 170 in #1 where I've been at). Having a player like Kazic is more of an achievement that it would be in #1, and it's also a lot harder to manage them well because of the increased speed of the simulation. Got myself a decent youth and an experienced player to get some points, I don't expect much out of either of them, I'll need to bide my time and hopefully eventually find someone better.

I'm in 2 and 12, FWIW.

November

Prakash Mooljee tallied another Tier-5 win, this one in Zagreb, and made the final in doubles as well. That his fourth tournament at that level, pushing him to 330th in the junior annals with the year's end coming up, and he'll try to successfully crack the Tier-4 wall once more before the latest crop of 18-year-olds turns pro.

Girish Girsh was very busy getting his late-season rush of matches in. At a Tier-1 challenger in Geneva he figured to have a chance against any of the top seeds, but lost a tough quarterfinal to Slovakian Cestmir Dziadosz, 5-7, 6-3, 6-4. The next week he fared better in Bratislava. Most of the best players there lost early as there was a lot of fatigue going around. A narrow victory in the final over Spain's Eduardo Serrano, 7-5, 7-6(2), got Girsh the biggest title of his career and second challenger, moving him up to just outside the Top 100. In Japan for the Toyota tier-2 event to finish off his season, he moved just inside it by reaching the semis where he was blasted aside by Manne Pascual. The former world no. 12 is a little out of his league, but it was still a fine finish to the year and despite losing both doubles matches he played over the three-week stretch, Girsh is set up perfectly to get through the five-week offseason and be ready to go again in January.


World Tour Finals

Bjorn Benda made this a proper coronation, rambling undefeated through his group and failing to drop a set in sweeping aside all comers. Gabriel Alastra fittingly gave him his toughest match, 7-6(4), 7-6(4) in a razor-thin semifinal, while Almagro was less of a challenge in the championship match. With a nearly three-thousand-point-lead, Benda is head and shoulders ahead of the field at the moment.

Antonin Iglar won one match but failed to get out of group play, Viktor Goncharenko had a solid semifinal run in his debut, and the big loser was Perry Hogue, the only player to go winless for the week. The American, who was #1 for four weeks just a couple of months ago, has clearly hit a poor patch and it's doesn't appear likely he's going to recover from it.

So the month-long offseason is upon us, with final 2039 rankings and 2040 predictions upcoming after that.

I just joined world 1 too

World Team Cup

There's a week yet left in the season, but the WTC Playoffs have completed. Our nemesis Austria, having edged Denmark 3-2 in the Level 2 Final, beat South Africa 4-1 to promote to Level 1 for the 2040 season. I have mixed feelings about this. I won't miss having to face them(they are still the only nation to beat us so far) but on the other hand they get to compete against the very best in the world, which is our ultimate goal and they stopped us from achieving it.

Revenge will be served cold if at all in this case.

Denmark is the only other nation to promote, as they defeated New Caledonia 3-2. Serbia and Monaco were relegated to Level 2 and will be among our potential foes. Sri Lanka finishes the year at 43rd in the world, just eight spots up from 51st a year ago. Our rise was definitely slowed by being knocked out earlier than usual. We've been drawn in Group 3 of Level 2 again, and will face Israel(29th), Romania(30th), and the Slovak Republic(26th) with Romania coming up first on an indoor court.

Israel is recently promoted from Level 3, going undefeated until a 3-2 loss to Luxembourg in the semis, but getting past Chinese Taipei easily 4-1 in the playoff. They have no Top 100 players and should be an easy out. Romania is a bit better, they also promoted from Level 3 and were beaten by Luxembourg as well(4-1 in the finals) before blanking Uruguay. They should not pose a serious threat to us either. The Slovak Republic lost two of three group matches last year, getting past only relegated Uruguay. All in all it really is a pretty easy group and we should easily win it with Romania probably second, followed by the Slovak Republic and Israel most likely. Looking around at the other groups, Group 3 seems to me to be by far the weakest. A stroke of luck for us, virtually guaranteeing at least a return to the quarterfinals.

2039 FINAL TOP TEN RANKINGS

And here we are, the end of a second year in this dynasty(and nearly a decade total for me) in the books. Thanks for joining me on the journey so far!

1. Bjorn Benda(DEU, 25) -- 11,450

Championships in Shanghai, Paris, and at the World Tour Finals in Belgium stamped Benda as the undisputed best player in the world. He hasn't lost an important match since the US Open three months ago, and made the quarters or better in all four slams and five Masters events. He's certainly helped by a weak cadre of contenders in his age bracket, but you can only beat the opponents in front of you. Either at or close to the peak of his powers, Benda is probably headed into a dominant 2040 campaign.

2. David Prieto(ESP, 29) -- 8,850

You can make an argument that despite his age, Prieto just had his finest season. He set a career-best with 74 wins against 17 losses and was only a sliver better in terms of winning percentage once(73-16 in '37, two years ago). The crown jewel was taking the title at the Australian Open and he'll need to repeat there if he wants to sustain this lofty position.

3. Mick Elder(USA, 28) -- 8,390

First-week defeats at the USO and Wimbledon hampered what was a spectacular season in many respects. He made six Masters finals, more than any other player, but walked away with just two crowns. Almost, but not quite in terms of being a consistent #1 threat, Elder is still more than a match for most of the elite.

4. Perry Hogue(USA, 25) -- 7,540

All signs point to a fairly quick decline now for the meteoric Hogue. He snagged the #1 ranking for almost a month in the late summer, but after a fantastic stretch lasting almost exactly one year his fall performances were disappointing, and in Perry's case it looks like a decline in athleticism, not a slump. It might be all he can do to stay in the Top 10 this year.

5. Viktor Goncharenko(RUS, 26) -- 6,420

The man who emphatically broke Alastra's stranglehold on the sport with a stunning run at Wimbledon has been decidedly unimpressive if solid since then. The general consensus is that he's a one-hit wonder who will hang around for a while, but has probably seen his lone brief moment in the sun. He has no Masters and just a single 500 to his credit, bolstering this argument.

6. Antonin Iglar(CZE, 23) -- 6,410

Iglar is the standard-bearer of the next generation, and his time has come. Objectively, he's the only player who has any real chance to unseat Benda. It's almost certain that he will, the only question is when. Probably it will take another year to two years, but if he can replicate the form he showed in crusing through all opposition in Cincinatti and the US Open, that could be sooner rather than later. I still think he'll be remembered as the best player in the post-Gorritepe area, Alastra included, before his time is done. Best guess is he finishes this year as #2 behind the German champion.

7. Gabriel Alastra(ARG, 30) -- 6,155

Flashes such as he showed at the tour finals are now few and far between, making this an opportune time to assess Alastra's place in history. His 6 Grand Slam titles are tied for 10th, 8 Masters Shields are a bit out of the top group(10th is 10 of them), and 92 weeks as #1 puts him 9th. Overall he's a solid second-tier great, bolstered by three consecutive seasons('36-'38) as the year-end #1. Not a transcendent talent, but definitely the best of his age bracket.

8. David Almagro(ESP, 29) -- 5,790

A strong finish to the year, but he's not getting any younger and missing his best event(Roland Garros) really hurt.

9. Evgeni Topolski(RUS, 26) -- 4,515

Toposki is a big, big-time disappointment. He should have been the top challenger to Benda at this point in my opinion. He's been mismanaged and seems to have lacked confidence, killer instinct ... something. The window is nearly closed for him. This past year probably should have been his best, he'll either make a big splash this year(unlikely) or be known to the history books as an underachiever.

10. David Alvarez(ESP, 27) -- 3,650

Alvarez is the current holder of the last spot, which seems to rotate between a series of players who can't make a serious move up. I expect to see him off the top page by year's end.

Sri Lanka Rankings Update

Anil Mehul -- 36th to 12th singles, 291st to 104th doubles. I'll be looking at his prospects for the coming year in more detail, but it was obviously a fine year, a career-best 52-20 win/loss and he won more prize money this year than he had lifetime coming in.


Girish Girsh -- 357th to 98th singles, 1557th to 424th doubles. Girsh has reached what is, based on Mehul's experienced, the last 'speed bump' in his rise through the rankings. He probably won't move up all that much this year. It will be a year of adjustment and acclimation as he will be playing all the Slams, at least the biggest Masters(Miami/Indian Wells), and a smattering of larger challengers along with probably a 250-level tournament or two. He does not, yet, have the advantage of fattening up his ranking with WTC points that Mehul and Chittoor had on their ascent.

Many of the players in the 50-100 range are still better than Girsh is. 2040 will probably be a year of seasoning, but by the end of it he should be ready to start reaching greater heights again. The more attentive readers may recall that he played a somewhat accelerated tournament schedule at the beginning of this last year; those points will now start to come off but continuing to build his technical abilities is still much more important. There is a solid foundation but he's not yet quite ready to be a top player, and a fair amount of fluctuation in his ranking is expected. When he's ready to move up again, the tournament results will begin to show it, and he continues to be on a strong path long-term.


Prakash Mooljee -- 168th juniors. The first 'establishing' year is in the books for the 15-year-old. Juniors throw a wrench into the works this time of year as the 18-year-olds are removed from the rankings at the start of each year. On the professional tour, veteran players slide down the rankings gradually, making such changes much less abrupt. In this case, Mooljee gained about 100 places almost overnight. He did very well in the last event, reaching a Tier-4 final in singles and winning the tournament in doubles. That will allow him several weeks of practice before he needs to get out there again. He'll slide down the rankings a fair amount in this time, since the bigger events are now more accessible to players who weren't ranked high enough until the 18-year-olds turned pro; it is typical for my juniors to actually gradually decline in their ranking for at least the first few months of the year because these other players are gaining points quickly, and it makes for a chaotic start to the year in which it is difficult to pick well what tournaments to enter.

As a baseline for looking at how Mooljee is doing as a player(good, on the whole), I like to look at how many players are ranked above a junior player that are younger. 168th may not look that impressive on paper but most of those above him are 17 and 16-year-olds, significantly more advanced in their physical maturity. In point of fact he is doing even better than I imagined; there is not a single player who is both younger and higher-ranked! He's just past 15 and a half, and there are only about a half-dozen(all at least several weeks older) who have not reached their 16th birthday yet. Not bad for a guy who I thought was pretty raw when he joined my 'stable' of players. The future's looking very good here.


Anil Manohar -- 442nd to 580th singles, 1472nd to 870th doubles. As expected, Manohar's rankings are 'evening out' as he works toward becoming a trainer. In less than a month he'll reach the point where his doubles skill has 'caught up' with the rest of his abilities and then splitting time between doubles and serving will commence for some while. He made better than expected progress this year, a hair under 4.0 as an expected trainer rating a year ago and now he's at 4.134 with almost eight years left to work on it. Of course, it is harder and harder to improve the better you get, but he should be able to finish as a very good though not quite maximum trainer by the time he retires into that role.


Manager Ranking -- 29th to 20th, 10k to 13.5k points. It's worth noting here that manager of both Benda and Iglar(a wealth of riches!) has taken over the #1 spot for the first time. Only three active players have ever been #1 on the rankings here, and they are current top 3, 7000 points clear of the field with at least 37k points each. I won't be in that stratosphere anytime soon but should be able to continue creeping upwards.

My minimum goal for Anil Mehul going into the 2040 season is to be one of the Top 8 who make the World Tour Finals. The semifinal run at the USO, specifically knocking off Mick Elder in particular, really showed that his time has now come. Beyond that though, how much can we really expect? I decided to take a more in-depth look at the top players and what to expect from them, working out on overall rating. As I did this, I also thought it might perhaps be useful to explain the various aspects of a player's abilities more, particularly since we have a few who are playing the game reading my musings. This post will detail that breakdown so for anyone interested in the results of my universe but not the technical analysis, feel free to skip the rest of this :). Most of this is in the game documentation but some is either not explained all that well or not synthesized in a way that, at least to me, makes sense.

Aging Factor -- All players have somewhere from 95% to 105% -- the lower end will result in a longer 'prime' as a professional, but players will not be as good as juniors and will not be able to train as much. Overall, less is better in terms of great pros which is what I focus on. Mehul is 95%, Girsh 96%, Mooljee 97% so my players are all on that end of the scale, quite intentionally. Most of the Top 10 is as well. Perry Hogue is a notable exception; he's about to turn 26 which isn't that old at all -- Mehul will probably hit his peak about then -- but I note him as a player in decline because he has a 103%(hence the meteoric label). Generally speaking junior #1 will have a 103% or more. A great example in my universe is a dominant junior between Alastra and Benda in age, Lubos Nedved. He is now almost 27, and basically won everything in juniors as a 17 and 18-year old and terrorized up-and-coming players(including Mehul) for a few years after that. He won the last five junior grand slams he was eligible for, but as a pro he has won just a pair of 250-level events and nothing higher, peaking at 19th and now 28th in the world and declining. Hogue is obviously a better version of this but he was never going to be a top player for long.

Age % -- This can be confused with aging factor but is not the same thing. This describes where a player is in their development, and is a multiplier that determines their actual ability at the time. For example, Mooljee has a raw ability of a little over 2.0 in skill, but because he's a young player, age % is only 68% and so he plays at a level of 1.4 instead. Skill, service, speed, strength, and endurance(twice, i.e. multiplied by 68% or whatever twice instead of once) are all affected by Age %, but the other abilities(mentality, doubles, talent, etc.) are not.

Static Attributes

These do not change throughout a player's career. They do not improve or decline with age, and they cannot be trained. They simply are -- a player is either good at them, or they are not, as a natural ability or lack thereof.

Talent -- Every player gains experience points, to be used in improving trainable skills(below) on a daily basis. It is the same amount every day. Mooljee(4.7) gets 31 xp per day, Manohar(2.0) gets 20 xp per day, etc. For particularly young and old players, this is especially important since they can't practice as much, meaning a higher proportion of their experience comes from their natural affinity or talent for the sport.

Mentality -- 'Clutch' ability that is used on important points, game points, break points, match points, etc.

Home Advantage -- Bonus given to players in front of their home crowd. This is largest in small events, and smallest in bigger ones: it disappears completely as a non-factor in Slams. I note it here only because it's there, but really it has a quite minor impact on the game. All else being equal I will play junior/future events in a player's home country, but of course all else is rarely equal and by the time you reach the level where it's really important to win, this virtually doesn't matter anymore .


Variable Attributes

All other attributes change based on a player's natural development curve(i.e., their age % which depends on the aging factor). The ones listed in this section cannot be trained either.

Endurance -- As I've mentioned, this is in my opinion the single most important attribute of a player. It defines how much a player can practice before become too tired to benefit from it. The formula here is simple: points played divided by endurance equals fatigue. I.e., a match with 100 points(for simplicity) and a player with 2.0 endurance will result in 50 fatigue. Above 500 fatigue performance penalties set in very quickly, so overworking a player beyond a certain point is just counterproductive. Since age % is divided in twice here, endurance both improves and declines much faster than anything else. This makes it doubly important to take advantadge of the 2-3 year 'physical peak' at which a player is at their maximum endurance(Girsh is about in the middle of this right now for me). That period is where trainers really shine, since these players can't play enough practice matches at that point to use up all of their fatigue allotment.

Strength -- Added directly to a player's skill to determine their playing ability in matches, but at a 20% rate(i.e., divided by five).

Speed -- The admin mentioned some years back that speed is a more complicated matter than strength, and never released the formula for it's effect. They said it was probably about the same impact as strength, but a number of players have mentioned they think strength is actually more effective in their players. It is generally thought to have the most impact on return of serve, but this is purely a logic-based conjecture.


Trainable Attributes

I've referred to these as the 'technical abilities/skills' at times. These are what I, as a manager, can improve using the experience points saved up via talent, matches, and training sessions.

Skill -- Basic rally ability of a player. This is used in all points, and is affected by age % as well.

Serve -- A player's serve ability is added to skill when they are the server. I.e, a player with 4.0 skill and 3.0 serve would have a base ability of 4.0 when returning, 7.0 when serving(before adding in speed/strength/mentality/etc. affects). Serve is also affected by age %.

Doubles -- Doubles is added to Skill in doubles matches, and(obviously) not used in singles. Importantly, it is not affected by age %, unlike the other trainable attributes.

Since Skill is always used but Serve only when serving, it is sensible and pretty much universally practiced to train Skill at least somewhat more.

Ok, so that's pretty much everything I know about the player attributes, all of which is a setup for:


Bryan's Overall Player Rating Formula

** Skill +
** 50% of Serve(again, since it's used half the time) +
** 40% of Mentality(a guess on it's importance, this is a matter of personal taste and the magnitude of the effect has not been publicly defined. Based on what I've seen this is a reasonable guess in my opinion. It may be a bit high but I don't think by much if it is) +
** 20% of Strength(official) +
** 20% of Speed(official estimate)

There are other matters such as a player's bonuses on the four surfaces, bonus or penalty depending on their form, and so on but all of these are completely within the control of the manager to properly prepare their player for success. The rating here is meant to simply describe the overall ability of a player at a given point in their career, to which good/mediocre/bad player management will add it's attendant effects.

2040 Outlook

Here's how the Top 20 shakes out in my universe, Game World 1, as the new year approaches:

1. Benda(9.93, 93%, 0-2)

One thing I like about how this works out is that we can see right away that an even 10.0 would be a pretty darn good estimate for a 'great player'. This provides for easy comparisons further down the list. The % given is each player's current age %, i.e. development stage. A rule of thumb I've seen but never verified is that 92-94% equates a player's peak. If so, then Benda is really at the apex of his career, which would make sense. It will be interesting(at least for a math-nerd such as I am) to track the numbers here over the next couple of years and see whether that is completely accurate or not. I also included Mehul's record against these player's in 2039, as I was curious how close he'd come to playing like a member of the elite the past 12 months.

2. Prieto(9.64, 85%, 0-2)
3. Elder(9.87, 87%, 2-1)
4. Hogue(9.66, 90%, 0-2)

Hogue depended heavily on his athleticism, and as mentioned it's starting to go quickly now. Elder, by contrast, has fabulous mental strength(4.4) which has allowed him to overcome some minor deficiencies ... so far. It ends with everyone eventually.

5. Goncharenko(9.56, 91%, 0-1)
6. Iglar(10.03, 97%, 0-2)

Iglar is a beast. There's just no two ways about that. He's trained up his skills noticeably in the offseason period. I see double-digit slams coming. The only good news for me is that he's aging faster than Mehul. I don't think that will be enough to close the gap though.

7. Alastra(9.52, 83%, 2-0)

It's always a bit painful to watch this part of a great player's career, when they simply don't have it anymore.

8. Almagro(9.89, 86%, 0-0)
9. Topolski(9.82, 92%, 0-0)

You almost don't have to look up the fact that both of these two have the same manager. They should both be Top 5 at a bare minimum, but they've missed Slams and had other mistakes each of the past two seasons. That kind of margin for error just doesn't exist.

10. Alvarez(9.66, 91%, 0-0)

Alvarez is as good as much of the Top 10, but he never got to the point of being better that you need to reach to really break through much higher.

11. Blanco(9.44, 91%, 0-0)
12. Anil Mehul(9.63, 97%, NA)

Ah, there's my hero! More on how his year looks in a bit.

13. Hammerstein(9.80, 97%, 2-2)

No matter how you slice it, his mental game and near-superhuman strength still appear to be a little more than enough to trump Mehul's world's-best baseline skills.

14-16. Becerril, Gorritepe, Kucerovic ... all well past their prime and not really worth delving into here. Total record of 3-4.

17. Gaskell(9.61, 96%, 3-1)
18. Borrman(9.33, 93%, 0-0)
19. Mockler(9.19, 96%, 1-0)
20. Groeneveldt(9.41, 96%, 0-0)

A few other notables:

39. Marcel Bahana(9.69, 99%)

Best of the younger players, just shy of 22 years old, he's powered by the best mental game(4.7) I've yet seen in a big talent. Skill is still not quite there yet but he could be scary good if handled properly. With #3 marsel as his manager, that's quite likely to happen.

64. Chittoor(8.82, 98%)
98. Girish Girsh(8.79, 99%)

Doing well, but as mentioned there's still work to do. Although the ranking gap is still significant, he is very, very close to becoming Sri Lanka's second-best player.

168(J). Prakash Mooljee(4.00, 68%)

Illustration of just how big the gap is to the youngsters.


Analysis

One thing that jumps out right away is the number of older, in-decline players at the top. Alastra's generation was packed but they are on their way out. By my count I would expect 13 of the current Top 20 will be less of a factor at this time next year than they are right now, with a few expected to basically free-fall now. Anil Mehul doesn't appear to have much to worry about from below either. The 17-20 spots reveal Gaskell as the only possible threat and he's aging a little faster along with being a player who depends more heavily on his outstanding athleticism. He got Mehul once last year and it may happen again but in the long-term, not a concern.

Benda and Iglar are the top two, period, with Elder/Almagro/Topolski the next tier. Elder and Almagro are going to be fading steadily though and Topolski has been misused. Hammerstein will probably push ahead of Mehul a bit this year, but really it's only the top two that should be able to consistently beat him. He should be competitive with the Austrian and everyone else as he continues to slowly improve and the rest of existing power structure, at varying rates, crumbles around him. Really Anil is set to benefit just as much from a weak era in the game as from the work that has been put in.

I think by the end of the year Bahana will make some real noise but he's got a lot of ground to make up in the rankings before he can be a consistent threat and he's going to have to start contending with his longevity issues soon(101%). It will be interesting to see in the next couple of years to see if any of the players who are roughly Girsh's contemporaries manage to distinguish themselves. Overall it seems so far that there are a lot of them capable of being good, but how many have a chance to be excellent or great, it's a bit too early to tell at right now.

So at the low end I put Mehul as Top 8 by year's end, but I can see him reaching as high as 4th. Still pretty heady territory regardless. If I had to guess right now I'd say at his career apex he can hit #2 in the world at some point when Benda starts to plummet in a few years, which is rather remarkable -- but I don't think he'll surpass Iglar at any juncture. This is of course an educated guesstimate and I can't state that will happen with any certainty, just my best call from here. He's got probably two years or a little more until he hits peak, with marginal improvements in that timeframe. I'll need to continue to make small adjustments and learn the nuances of managing a player at the very top -- every year there have been new wrinkles. After the Paris doubles run jacked up his doubles ranking, he'll be representing Sri Lanka in that category in the WTC.

Looking at the Head-2-Heads mentioned above, he was just 2-8 against the Top 5, both wins coming against Elder. That accounts for almost half of his losses this season. Against the next five(6-10), the combined mark was only 2-2 -- it's rather remarkable that he didn't play Almagro, Topolski, or Alvarez even once in '39, and has never met David Almagro in his entire career! The #11-20 combined total is 9-7, and by elimination then his record against opponents who are now 21 or lower in the rankings was a sparkling 39-3. That last category won't improve a whole lot; he'll still be vulnerable to those kinds of players at least on clay. To really push through this year as he needs to, Mehul will have to more consistently go deep in the Slams and Masters, which will involve beating players in the Top 20 category more often than the 13-17(43%) composite he put together this year. I'd like to see that up to something more like at least two wins for each loss in 2040.

I'll also be closely watching the Girsh/Chittoor developments. I would hazard a guess at this point that sometime between end of group play in the spring, and the knockout rounds in the fall, Girsh will surpass Chittoor and become the second representative for Sri Lanka in the World Team Cup. A lot could happen there either way though and it's far from certain the switch will happen this year. The sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Next up is the WTC tie against Romania, currently underway, with the Australian Open to follow three weeks later.

World Team Cup Level 2 Group 3 First Round
Sri Lanka vs. Romania(Indoor)

Monday: A. Mehul d. H. Prunea, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0
Tuesday: O. Funar d. A. Chittoor, 6-4, 6-4, 6-2
Wednesday: O.Kammerer/B. Miklos d. A.Mehul/A. Chittoor, 2-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, 13-11
Thursday: A. Mehul d. O. Funar, 6-2, 3-6, 6-0, 6-1
Friday: A. Chittoor d. H. Prunea, 6-2, 6-3, 6-4

Sri Lanka defeats Romania 3-2!

There was a lot more drama here than expected, or for that matter more than I desired as well. After a triple-bagel start by Mehul, Chittoor showed up out of match shape as expected and got himself upset. Then in the doubles, I thought it was over when we were up two sets to none and came back to find us serving for the match at 8-7 in the fifth! After saving three break points and also blowing two match points, we were broken only to break again and serve for it at 9-8. This repeated at 10-9, and 11-10, until finally the Romanians held and took the match in an absurd comeback. When you have four chances to serve for it and can't get it done, you bloody well deserve to lose. How utterly ridiculous, an absolutely absurd loss.

Down 2-1 at that point, it was an open question whether we would even win the tie. Other than the second set Mehul was strong again in his second singles match, and by Friday Chittoor was back to a decent level of play and got a solid win in the decider to put us through. Funar is better than we thought -- Romania might well be good enough to stick in Level 2 now, but frankly we should not have lost either of the rubbers that we did. Chittoor probably still wins if he's ready to play, and the doubles loss is just really beyond words. It probably should have been a 5-0 skunking, but at least we got the victory in the tie which is the most important thing in the final analysis.

Sri Lanka is now bumped up a couple of spots to 41st, tying our high from last year at the end of group competition. Israel also went the distance in edging the Slovak Republic 3-2, and we'll get them next, again on an indoor court. That at least is a nice bit of fortune. The winner of that tie will be assured a place in the quarterfinals no matter what happens in the third round.

Three weeks now until the Australian Open. Mehul has enough matches in that he'll skip the 250s in those weeks; that'll result in the loss of 105 points as he made the Brisbane final last year, but it's the best way to set himself up for a deep run in Australia and that's far more important. Girsh will be heading to a loaded tier-1 challenger in Sao Paolo: there are two tier-1s as the only challengers prior to the AO and he needs to get a few matches in. They have almost as strong a field as the 250s: this time of year is crazy with almost everyone scrambling to get in the right amount of tournament play. He won't be in the seeds so he'll have to hope for a decent draw.

At any rate, Girsh's AO debut will be on the cards and Mehul will be looking to improve on last year's career-best 4th-round finish, while Mooljee will be taking an extended break here to train and let things settle out in the junior ranks.

I currently have the #1 junior in the world 11.

Not that he's a superstar but he's been trained well.

I bought VIP and spent one on world 4. Then got a 36yo player after reading your posts and he turned into a 4.7 trainer. Must admit I don't understand the formula for figuring out what a player will be as a trainer.

Anyways, thanks for letting us know about this game.

Tell

Sounds like you are doing very well!

As far as the trainer formula goes, on the 'Use Experience' screen, look at your skill, service, and doubles abilities. For example, for me Manohar currently has 108 skill, 77 service, 74 doubles.

The formula is 100% of skill, 75% of service, 33% of doubles, then divide that total by 2.3. So in this example:

** Skill: (108 x 1.00) = 108
** Service: (77 x .75) = 57.75
** Doubles: (74 x .33) = 24.42
** Total: (190.17 / 2.3) = 82.683 ...

That's the 'raw' total, to convert it to 'tennis balls', i.e. the 5-point scale, divide by 20. That gives 4.134, so I'd expect him to be a 4.1 if I converted to him to a trainer without any more work.

Hope that helps, but otherwhise glad you found the game enjoyable in any event.

Edit: I should add though that a 4.7 is pretty darn good, and should let you come quite close to maxing out your players. The difference is not likely to be all that important between 4.7 and 5.0.

January

As mentioned before the only tournament was Girsh playing in the Sao Paolo Tier-1 challenger. It was really quite the fitting microcosm of the current stage in his career: he beat 4th-seeded Ivo Montalvo(ARG, 56th), a clay-court specialist, in a tough first-round match 6-4, 7-6(9). American Tommy Day(87th), beat him easily in the next match 3 & 3 however. These are exactly the kinds of players he'll need to get past to take the next step.

A couple of observations are worth noting heading into the AO, which has now begun. Gabriel Alastra and Spasoje Kucerovic have now removed themselves from singles altogether, which will lead to more opportunities for the younger players. It seems their manager is headed towards making Alastra a trainer as soon as possible, or else he just wants a good veteran doubles team. The former is more likely, he has a 4.5 and a 4.9 but Alastra could be made a 5.0 easily. Regardless of the why, Alastra has now essentially resigned any impact on the singles scene.

Also, Amrik Chittoor has now not played any events aside from the WTC in several months. He's in free-fall, and is probably going to be basically useless in the next round for Sri Lanka. This will cause quite a problem as losing to Israel is actually quite likely since he's almost certainly not going to fall far enough for Girsh to take his place until later. His manager, having never discovered what practice tournaments are for, appears to have abandoned the game and my task is going to be more difficult for it. This is a great time to perhaps trumpet the 'Holiday Mode' option which allows for players to enter tournaments as if they weren't human-managed if the manager wants to leave the game, even temporarily. I suspect a lot of managers aren't aware of the option, esp. new ones(I don't even know where it is, but it's in the documentation somewhere).

At any rate, the AO is next on the docket. Mehul is defending a 4th-round result while Girsh makes his debut.

2040 Australian Open

Doubles was interesting: Mehul had to qualify and did so, then lost in the first round; Girsh had a better partner and actually made it to the second round. It was rather humorous to see him matched up in singles against world no. 1 Bjorn Benda to open things up: it started ok but got worse with a bagel to finish off a very predicatable straight-sets defeat. Three straight losses in Slams to start his career and probably a fourth to complete the cycle at the French, but Mehul lost 3 of his first 5 first-rounder so this really doesn't mean anything yet.

As for Anil Mehul, he cruised through the first three rounds, allowing no more than five games in any of them. Then the time came to face the music against Perry Hogue in the fourth round. Hogue had soundly beaten him in both of their previous matches, both coming last year during the best period of his career. He was now on the decline and had overplayed just a hair .... and that probably ended up being the difference as otherwhise he would still be slightly favored on hardcourt. After taking a pair of tiebreaks, Mehul played a miserable third set, lost a tiebreak in the fourth, and barely edge out the win 7-6(2), 7-6(7), 1-6, 6-7(3), 7-5. He was actually outpointed 182-179 but that was mostly due to the middle set. Just a little better on the most important points, this was a match that could have gone either way and was as much as anything a victory for being set up properly.

Pierce Gaskell was knocked out in the third round, Hammerstein overplayed as well and was eliminated in the fourth by Evgeni Topolski. The Russian no. 2 would be Mehul's foil in the quarterfinals. The head-to-head wasn't any better in this matchup, 0-3 lifetime, but they hadn't met at all last year. Two were in Slams, one in a Masters, so all on big stages. This time I thought Mehul had a small edge. He started well, but Topolski fought back. After breaking to serve out the match 5-4 in the third, it looked like it was over. He was broken back, and it went to a tiebreak. Mehul went down a minibreak twice early, but fought back himself, and Topolski cracked at 7-all. A double fault handed Mehul his fourth match point, and he took it for a 6-2, 6-4, 7-6(7) win that was more dramatic at the end than it should have been.

In the semis, it was ... guess who? That's right, the force of nature himself, Antonin Iglar. He hadn't lost a set yet, and served up a shocking breadstick to start. Mehul played better after that, but couldn't take advantage of his chances. He dropped nine of 10 break points for the match, and was done in straights 6-1, 6-4, 7-5. It was as tough as any match Iglar would have, as he downed Benda in the final who had survived five-set thrillers over Almagro(8-6 in the fifth!) and Elder(lost the first two sets in tiebreaks before rallying) to get there himself.

Iglar moved up to third, a hair behind Elder and added a second Slam trophy to his case. He simply has no peer on hardcourts right now. If he plays well, he's going to win and that's the end of it. In making the final, Benda -- who had never gone past the quarters at this, his weakest Slam -- extended his lead over the field to an astonishing 4,000 points. It's a gap that is nearly of Gorritepe proportions, and Iglar's chase has begun in earnest. The question is, can the Czech prodigy do enough on clay to significantly narrow the gap?

Mehul is now up to a new career high at 11th, and only 120 points out of 10th. Attention turns back now to the World Team Cup. The second round of group play is now under way, with Chittoor in worse shape to compete than ever ... Getting the two wins over Hogue and Topolski was huge though. Aside from not beating either one before, it's a second straight Slam semifinal, and those are exactly the kinds of matches he needs to win to have a successful year. It was the kind of quality that could see him reach the Top 5 if he can sustain it.

World Team Cup Level 2 Group 3 Second Round
Sri Lanka(1-0) vs. Israel(1-0), Indoor

Monday: A. Mehul d. A. Kuttab, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0
Tuesday: U. Naybet d. A. Chittoor, 6-3, 7-6(12), 7-5
Wednesday: A. Mehul/A. Chittoor d. A. Kuttab/U. Naybet, 6-3, 6-1, 6-2
Thursday: A. Mehul d. U. Naybet, 6-0, 6-1, 6-3
Friday: A. Chittoor d. A. Kuttab, 6-1, 6-1, 6-4

Sri Lanka defeats Israel, 4-1!

Well, this tie was quite surprising. Playing indoors was an advantadge but not a huge one against the Israelis. Chittoor losing his first singles match was unsurprising, but he did well to put up a good fight being so out of match shape. When the doubles went our way easily for the 2-1 lead, it was pretty much over because there's no way Mehul was going to lose to anyone Israel has, and Chittoor rebounded by the end of the week for a nice win. Israel really only has one player good enough to play at Level 2 competition, and that did them in.

Romania edged the Slovak Republic 3-2, and we now have nothing to worry about. We are in the quarterfinals and will also finish atop the group no matter what happens. The winner of the Romania-Israel tie could equal us if we somehow lose to the Slovakians, but even in that case we'd own the tiebreaker against either.

Sri Lanka is now up to 35th, easily our best placing to date. It's a big load off my mind to have qualified for the knockout stages. Even if Chittoor hasn't slid far enough to let Girsh in the competition by the last group match, he will assuredly have done so(barring some super-bizarre turn of events) by the fall, and the Mehul/Girsh tandem that will take us through the next several years will finally be formed.

In the meantime, Prakash Mooljee easily rammed his way through a surprisingly weak field to get double titles in his latest Tier-4 event. He's up to 150th now in juniors. I'm in no hurry to move him up to Tier-3's, because he's been getting drilled in practice events lately. He seems to be in that rare 'sweet spot', getting a lot of matches in during tournament weeks, and able to then take a month or even more off for beneficial practice sessions against more advanced players. I'm going to ride that train as long as I can.

Girsh will be heading to a tier-2 challenger in Bergamo in a couple of weeks, it'll be a strong field there most likely but he's set to lose more points than he gains the next few months anyway. Right now that's pretty irrelevant for him; he'll start moving up when he's good enough to beat the better challenger players(33-100 approx. in the rankings) more consistently, and until then it can't be rushed; there's little point in doing anything but maximizing his training. It'll come when it comes. Mehul has about a month off, and will probably play in the Dubai 500 before the Masters in Indian Wells and Miami finish off the first quarter of the year. Overall, it's a pretty dry period coming up the next few weeks in terms of action on the court.

Aside: I dropped Delacave and picked up a 30yo Peruvian who was ~75th in singles and ~50th in doubles. I enjoy that he's still a choice for WTC matches, so I figured I'll retire him when he slips out of the selection for that. 2 years later, he's ~125th and ~50th, with a trainer potential slightly better than 4.6, and is still a WTC participant, so I'm enjoying his twilight years.

What I'm wondering is this--once I have a trainer in the fold, how does that trainer work in conjuction with practice sessions? I know practice sessions lead to manager points which help to hire players, so that's one advantage there. But trainers yield more consistent results in development, as far as I'm aware. Are trainers the way to maximize practice after getting bounced out of tourneys early? Or are they worth more than that?