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Paris Masters
Two key early exits to note here, and both of them very close. Eddy Copperfield has recently returned, like a bad weed that refuses to go away, to the Top 10. And here he was taking down (8) Oleg Urazov in a third-set tiebreaker. An all-Cyprus third round showed that Alketas Albanos still can get a word in on the indoor courts; his match with (4) Themis Xanthos also went three sets before the lower-ranked player prevailed.
Ene Caballero had less fortune this time in the quarterfinals; he ran into Faille right away and won a total of three games. Ouch. Jochen Weigle actually played well for once, pushing Cananis but still losing 7-5, 7-5. Copperfield exited competitively to Polychroniadis, but Albanos wasn't done. The 16-seed advanced to the semis with a 3-6, 7-6(4), 6-4 comeback victory over Toni Bardales.
There was some exciting tennis over the last two rounds; every match was close. Renke Cananis nearly took a set from Faille in a 7-6(7), 6-4 semifinal defeat, while Leon Polychroniadis was pushed to three before ending Albanos' impressive run. The final went to Ben Faille as you might expect, but it's probably down just to the home crowd. 6-4, 7-6(2) was the scoreline there.
The field for the Tour Finals is set with the expected players, there were no changes on that front.
Elsewhere ...
A rare case of being overly fatigued coming in helped limit Aparna Chandrasekharan to a quarterfinal exit in his latest futures excursion in China. He'll have at least one more outing yet this year.
Sushant Srivastava will be heading out a year-end end burst of Challenger events the next few weeks, and then he'll actually get a brief off-season break.
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