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Wimbledon 2088: Early Rounds
This tournament went entirely according to script ... until somebody ripped up the script and threw it away. The only seed to lose in the first round was 30-year-old Argentinian (19) Gabriele Spotelli, and even then it came in a tough match to a player boosted by a favorable crowd, Jeff Roach. 7-5 in the 5th set. And then Roach lost in the third round. Every pretender had lost by then; the fourth round had every single one of the 16 players seeded to make it that far. Without exception.
And then (10) Eddy Copperfield, who to this point has been 'that guy who couldn't figure out that he's supposed to get out of the Top 10 so the real players can replace him', shocked none other than #1 Leon Polychroniadis, 6-3, 6-7(5), 6-3, 6-4. Polychroniadis looked like a freight train both this year and long-term coming in, he had won on the grass last year, runner-up the year before, and hadn't lost in the fourth round or before at a Slam in almost three years. It was nearly unthinkable. And yet it still happened. (7) Toni Bardales lost in a tough four sets to (12) Alketas Albanos), probably the biggest win we've seen recently for the no. 2 Cypriot, and (5) Jochen Weigle was straight-settled by upstart Ale Ballok.
That's all in the top half, which is now chaos. Only Xanthos remains of the players expected to reach the quarterfinals. The bottom half; the script remains intact. Cananis and Reimann were both pushed to tough four-set wins, but everyone marched on. Without Polychroniadis, the second half of Wimbledon is now wide-open. Cananis is the only player in the draw to have won here - two years ago - but it hardly seems a foregone conclusion that he's up to the task again.
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