Just shows how beneficial having good a good back up can be! Vigo's miles away from Barcelona.

I'm very pleased that Ed is doing Challenger qualies. There's absolutely no point in getting your ranking up by playing weaker tourneys as eventually you'll be caught in the 300-400 range till you improve your tennis, too. And the only way to improve your tennis is to play better players.

Good luck to both. Should be an experience for Alex Ward even if he doesn't win.

It's going to be tough for Edward to qualify here, but hopefully he can win his first round match and then push Aldi in the final qualifying round, or ideally beat him, but I wouldn't be expecting that at all.

It's good that he's trying challenger qualifying to improve his game, and hopefully he'll get lucky in one of the events and qualifies, but I am a bit concerned about how many points he has to defend, as unless he picks up some points soon he's going to drop down to 700/800, and then he won't be seeded in some futures (but his tennis should be better when he drops back to get the points and ease through them)

Eitzinger is about as good a draw Alex could have hoped for, but don't think he'll get close to him.

QR2: (q8) Edward Seator WR 524 lost to Pedro Clar (ESP) WR 597 by 6-0 7-6(5)

The 1st set looks to have been a total disaster, but Edward almost managed to take it to a 3rd in the end.

I'm glad he's having a go at Challenger qualifying, but I am a bit worried about what's going to happen to him in Futures draws when the big points come off.

I mean, you can argue that all those African Futures points and the Futures run when two of his opponents retired may mean that he is over-ranked (though I wouldn't say his results suggest that his true level is as low as Akhenaten's rankings imply - somewhere in between the two probably), but that's only a problem if you are so over-ranked that you are getting into draws a level too high for you and losing in R1 every time.

On the Futures circuit, you can only really gain by being over-ranked, because if you are ranked high enough to be seeded, you're still likely to get to play against the better players in those Futures fairly regularly (good for experience), but you're more likely to have been able to get a couple of confidence-building wins under your belt in the tournament before you meet them.

Anyway, I know what Edward says about trying to improve his standard of play without worrying too much about the rankings, and I'm sure he is going the right way about doing that, I just hope he doesn't get a run of dire, potentially confidence sapping Futures draws if his ranking does dive a bit when the big points come off.

-- Edited by steven at 20:31, 2008-08-09

To be fair to Ed he has had some great results that suggest his ranking might not be too false, beating Balleret in straight sets on Clay and also beating Polansky in america on hard shows that he can definately mix it!

Wardinator lost 6-4, 6-1

Expected loss really, but he did well to push Eitzinger for 1 set at least, and he got his win in the doubles though which will help him gain some more money.