I knew I'd heard of the Battistone brothers before (I had come across a vid of thatracquet before for some reason), I just couldn't work out why. I'm a bit shocked they won using that contraption - it hasn't been a good tournament for Ken, has it!

As for dropshots, wouldn't it be typical if that's the one thing Andy does that the rest of the Brits have decided to copy. However, the MTF reporter suggests that, in a good way, Richard's droppers are very un-Andy-like!  I should think the reporter was impressed at seeing a player outside the top 300 play that well - I was impressed with how Bloomers played relatively to his ranking at Wimby last year, and he was much higher-ranked back then.

Anyway, by far the most important thing today was that Bloomers won and got the points for qualifying.  It's a huge pity that he's been drawn against Delic (a name I always assumed was pronounced De-leech until he was announced as Delick at Queen's last year), a player who was ranked 60 last July when there were better options available.

So far this year, Delic has qualified for the AO, where he beat Kendrick in R1 then only lost to Monaco 8-6 in the 5th in R2. He then won the Dallas Challenger and reached the QFs of Las Vegas ATP.

The reason Delic's ranking has dropped so much since last July (similar in % terms to Richard's drop, in fact) is that following a stellar series of Challenger performances in late 2006 (2 titles in a total of 6 Finals plus two more semis in a 4-month period), he started playing ATPs and has generally struggled there, often losing in R1 and rarely getting past R2, a plight which befalls lots of players who get into the lower reaches of the top 100 - not always quite the holy grail it may seem on the way up there. However, he was the player who stopped this year's Miami AMS winner, Davydenko, in Miami last year!

Unfortunately he still does really well at Challenger level, so Richard could hardly have got a worse draw - will his bad run of luck with draws ever end? It might well be possible to have a stab at quantifying how much of his rankings slump is due to the dire draws, but I'll leave that temptation aside for now!

A small chink of light is that Boggo beat Delic 2-6 6-4 5-7 in Sydney qualifying last year and went on to beat him 3 & 4 in IW qualifying too!

FQR: (q6) Richard Bloomfield WR 374 beat Luka Gregorc (CZE) WR 438 by 6-3 4-6 6-2

L32: (Q) Richard Bloomfield WR 374 v (5) Amer Delic (USA) WR 145
L32: Alex Bogdanovic WR 258 v Robert Smeets (AUS) WR 162

Edit: Gregorc got a LL place and got drawn against Hugo Armando. How unfair is that?!  The winner of that plays the winner of Bloomers-Delic.

-- Edited by steven at 02:14, 2008-04-22