Kazim Dizdar had one last singles match in practice that he actually won, so nice highlight before his week off and on to Corfu.
Corfu - Junior Grade 5
Weird tournament and the biggest shock of Dizdar's career to date:
That's right - our hero is the 1 seed in both brackets, and there's mysteriously no 2 seed in singles draw.
Clearly they've been drinking too much ouzo in Corfu because the tournament organizers think Dizdar is both 1 seed worthy and they opted to have a 3 and 4 seed, but not a 1 seed. Go figure.
Anyway, in doubles, the alliterative Turk and Thai team oust the Swede and the Russian 6-3, 7-6 (9-7). In the first set,
Dizdar and
Acenio fell behind 0-2 before rallying back to take over. Set 2, they pissed away a 3-1 lead to go down 3-4 before finally forcing it to a grueling sweep set. The total point differential was 9, so very narrow match.
The semi-finals was against Mexican
Raul Vecco-Garda and Frenchman
Ben Berchet, a Napoleonic pairing if ever there was one. That duo conquered their QF opponents in a 6-4, 3-6, 6-4 full setter so hopefully they had some fatigue coming in. I missed most of the match, but after Dizdar and Acenio stunk up the joint in the first set, they came back to edge narrow margins in the second and take the third fairly comfortably: 2-6, 7-5, 6-3.
On to the championship! Italian
Benito Ambrosini and Croatian
Berko Tabakovic stunned the 2 seed pair of Portuguese
Mauricio Agra and Mexican
Rodolfo Riojos: 6-7 (9-7), 6-3, 6-4. Once again T&T were horrible in the first set, falling by an identical to semi-finals 2-6 score before getting their heads out of their asses and winning the second set 6-3.
The decider was as back and forth a game as you could have -
Literally every single point in the first two games was a deuce in Set 3 and the top seeds finally gritted out a 7-6 (8-6) triumph for
Karim Didzar's first title of any kind! How close was it?
106-102 point differential. Talk about a knife's edge - any given day win. But the victory is all that counts.
Singles side saw
Dizdar take on
Tabakovic in the first round. I missed that entire match, but our Turk inversed his doubles performance - won the first set, lost the second, and fought like hell to prevail in the third - a 6-3, 4-6, 7-6 (7-5) gruel fest keyed by a 67% to 44% second serve win percentage differential. Everything else was narrow edges.
I'm nervous when I see German
Herbert Feinblatt on the other side in the quarterfinals: a clay court specialist (50%) who is more in form and more well-rested than
Dizdar. Sure enough, it's a 2-6, 3-6 comparative squash and Dizdar is out in the quarters.
Feinblatt continues his run by topping Indian
Anat Muthupalaniappan 7-6 (6-4), 6-3, and the nation of India is even further depressed when not only are their all-Indian hopes crushed by that defeat, but there's no representation at all after
Ambrosini sends home
Rakesh Maitreya 6-2, 2-6, 7-5.
I'm shocked when
Ambrosini takes down
Feinblatt 7/6 (7-5), 6-3 to take the singles crown. Everything favored Feinblatt on paper - he skipped doubles, so was more well-rested, had superior Clay advantage (50% to 43%), was more talented, mentally tougher, faster, stronger... and yet, he still lost. That's sports sometimes.
Either way, a massive financial windfall for
Karim Dizdar. $14 in career winnings jumps up to $47,
over tripling his career earnings in one tournament.
He's exhausted again, so he'll take the week off before heading to Ireland to participate in a grass J5. I've noticed there's no players I've seen who specialize in grass, so it seems like a market area to exploit - even though Grass is Dizdar's own worst surface at 15% (it started off at 8%). As to why another tournament and not practice? Dizdar actually started the tournament at 14.9 form so I want to make sure it stays up as much as possible.
Next update will have the hero's ranking adjustment - I'm expecting to see it skyrocket thanks to his first quarterfinals singles appearance and first doubles title.