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2048 Australian Open
Opening Rounds
There was some big news before the tournament even began. Antonin Iglar was fired by oprice, who decided he's had enough and left the game. Eventually he was picked up by an apparently decent manager but not one of the top guys ... yet. The new manager has a 5.2 trainer so Iglar should be in pretty good hands.
As for the tournament itself, the early rounds saw more upsets than usual. Marcek has certainly fallen far, dropping out right away against a qualifier from Argentina. 28th-seeded Tristan Benitez was eliminated by Joseph Skirrow who has basically made a career out of this kind of thing,. 9-7 in the 5th in that one. Gustavo Caratti had to go five sets against Sampras, nearly a disastrous start to the year for him. Federer and Serbia's Petko Ljaljevic(30th, his first Slam as a seeded player) all failed to get past the first round as well.
Shyam Senepathy got a win as he was fortunate enough to meet a qualifier in the first round, but he followed it up with a total of one game in getting crushed by Garreth McCuskey in the next round. Nothing new there for him, he's reached the second round four times and lost each occasion now. Zakirov had an early exit here, as did Thiago Herrera courtesy of French qualifier Gael Monfils. Once a promising young player, Monfils had descended to about 150th in the rankings but he sure showed up in this event. Cirakovic bowed out in a four tight sets to Phillipe Besson, a Swiss player on the rise. Ujjaval had bit of a close call before getting past Guardado. All in all, a quarter of the players still active were unseeded, which is about twice the normal amount.
Girish Girsh cruised through to the third round, but he got himself a serious scare from Andre Herrera. Despite badly outplaying the least-known of the Peruvian clan most of the match, Girsh lost a tiebreaker in the first set and again in the third, forcing a comeback win that went the distance. It would have been one of the biggest upsets I've ever seen if he failed to get past this stage after winning the title last year. Elsewhere, Tomas Niklas ended Bourdet's tournament early in a great match, 8-6 in the 5th set, and Agustin Herrera was the latest victim of Blagota Cojanovic, one of the top unseeded players here.
In the final matches of the first week, Girsh got back on track by allowing just a single game to Bjorn Benda, who had done well just to get this far with a couple of tough matches. Mooljee lost a set for the first time, but was a convincing winner still over Gaskell in four to reach his first Slam quarterfinal. Mehul continues to put together solid wins, while Shreya Ujjaval was stopped short with a somewhat disappointing loss to Kinczllers, 6-7(3), 6-3, 6-7(6), 6-4, 6-1. Just ran out of gas apparently, but he should be at this point a little better and was up a set twice in the match. Only 1 of 6 on break points for Ujjaval in that one. Cojanovic keeps moving on, adding Poilblan to his list of scalps ... after getting bageled in the first set, he won the next three!
Elsewhere
Ritwik Dudwadkar was also playing, in the junior AO. He had a solid QF run in doubles, but was fairly tired by the time he reached the third round in singles, losing there to Jakob Heinen, 6-7(7), 7-6(3), 6-2. That was one round short of his goal of making the quarters there as well.
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