Every 10-15 minutes when watching a match on the Guillermo Vilas centre court in Buenos Aires, you can hear the faint rattle of an overground train passing just above the top of the stand. It’s an oddly aesthetic and contrasting sight to the tennis that takes place below. The ATP 250 tournament in Buenos Aires is an event steeped in esteemed champions: Carlos Moya, Juan Carlos Ferrero, David Ferrer (and also some bloke called Rafael Nadal) to name a few. Due to the withdrawal of top 10 players Dominic Thiem and Matteo Berrettini, Diego Schwartzman again headed up this week’s field and took up the mantle of Argentina’s best hope in ending a thirteen-year drought of home-nation champions in the capital, having fallen just short in the final last year.
One of the most interesting nuances to emerge from this week’s action is the challenges of defeating an injured player, especially when that injury is picked up at some point during the match. It’s akin to playing a football team that have just gone down to ten men – in that all the pressure and expectation is centralised on one of the competitors, and handling that pressure is not as simple as it should be. In both quarter-finals in the top half of the draw, Pablo Cuevas and Thiago Monteiro both were not up the task, falling to Diego Schwartzman and Pedro Sousa respectively, with both victors virtually on one leg at the match’s end. The circumstances surrounding both injuries were different; Cuevas and Schwartzman had been battling it out for over three hours before Schwartzman tore his left adductor when stretching for a backhand deep into the third set. The point following the incident (after Schwartzman received a somewhat hasty medial timeout during the game) showed the extent to which he was physically hampered; barely being able to move out towards his left hand side. For Cuevas, the tactical blueprint was visually presented before him: hit as much as possible to Schwartzman’s backhand and try using short angles on both sides to get him running. Yet, a tennis player’s brain is a complicated mechanism, and the fact that Schwartzman walked off the court having won 7-5 in the third shows us that Cuevas’ had developed some faults in the preceding 20 minutes. It definitely hadn’t helped that he had squandered four match points (including two on his own serve) in the second set tiebreak and played each one with a noticeable lack of conviction and belief. The general cliché within tennis is that you have to try as much as possible to play the opponent as if he wasn’t injured, but Cuevas’ passivity and general one-dimensional approach in just making the ball and hoping Schwartzman would miss is evidence to his inability to overcome this mental barrier. In fairness to the Uruguayan, Schwartzman completely loosened up and was in the position where he could go for broke on pretty much every shot that was in his wheelhouse. While the term “choke” is overused in describing how a player was able to lose from a seemingly favourable position, it wouldn’t be overly harsh to apply this word to Cuevas considering the circumstances.
In regards to the Sousa-Monteiro match, it was much less straightforward. Sousa had benefited from a loose opening few games from the Brazilian to establish an early lead, before appearing to feel something in his left calf as early as 3-2 in the first set. This is arguably the trickiest “injured player” situation, as Monteiro was forced to rethink and possibly alter his gameplan after only a very short period in the match, without himself having too much baseline rhythm. Even now, analysing how this quarter-final unfolded doesn’t provide clear answers to explain its outcome; Monteiro at times struggled to put the ball in court and simply cracked under the aforementioned pressure (it is possible both players would have been privy to Schwartzman’s injury and its seriousness, transcending their match into a virtual semi-final).
In regards to performance level this week, there was one player who was relatively unmatched in his progression through the draw. Casper Ruud had his first breakout week around this time three years ago, coming from nowhere to make the semi-finals in Rio. The resulting year and eight months after saw a frustratingly limited amount of progression considering his clear talents on the court, but 2019 was his real breakthrough: making his first ATP Tour final in Houston and putting together a generally consistent year to qualify for the season-ending Next Gen Finals in Milan. He had already started 2020 off impressively with two top-20 wins over John Isner and Fabio Fognini in the ATP Cup, and seems to be relishing the opportunity of leading Norwegian tennis into a new age, following in the footsteps of his father Christian (whose career-high he ironically superseded by winning the title this week). He brushed aside Spanish clay-court specialists Pablo Andujar and Roberto Carballes Baena for the loss of only six games combined in the first two rounds, and was only fully troubled by Juan Ignacio Londero in the semi-finals. Quality-wise, this was probably the best match of the tournament – both players looking to take the attack to the other at any opportunity with their booming forehands, and for the majority of the match Ruud seemed overwhelmed by Londero’s direct approach and pinpoint accuracy in consistently finding the Norwegian’s significantly weaker backhand wing. A combination of a very tight game from Londero serving it out and some smart tennis at the business end of the set allowed Ruud to escape from his stronghold, and the Argentine never fully recovered to pose a substantial threat in the third. Ruud’s distinctive features from other generic clay-court players are primarily his serve (hit 23 aces through the week and averaged 77% first serve points won – a number that most other players won’t come close to matching) and his forehand, which is a different beast in both its power, length and ability to kick up and force players onto the defensive.
A special mention should be given to this week’s finalist Pedro Sousa. Anyone who avidly follows the ATP Challenger Tour knows the entertainment and level that this guy can bring to a tennis court on his day, and with a decent slice of luck, he was able to display glimpses of that on the main tour. Entering the draw as a lucky loser, he managed to make it past the lowest ranked Argentinian wildcard Facundo Diaz Acosta, before an impressive performance saw him squeeze past tricky Slovak Jozef Kovalik to make the quarter-finals. The fact that from here his path to the final was less than salubrious (the strange quarter-final against Monteiro, then a walkover against Schwartzman) shouldn’t detract from the special nature of the week for the 31-year-old Portuguese, who had never made an ATP Tour quarter-final before this week. His relaxed, smooth style of play is a refreshing variation from the gritty intensity of so many of the clay-court grinders who populate the Golden Swing, and his capacity to play lights out for six games then horrifically for the next six just adds to his commercial value. It was unfortunate for him that he could not fully shrug off the injury he sustained during the quarter-final before the biggest match of his career – from the moment Ruud got his opening service break the 6-1 6-4 outcome seemed somewhat inevitable. Sousa’s story perfectly encapsulated the strange yet fascinating nature of this week’s event, and the general unpredictability of clay court tennis.
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