Pretty clinical from Andy. He'll be glad this is over quickly.

Good to see Andy being so professional and his serve in such good nick.

17 = the fewest games Andy has ever lost in the first week of a slam (he'd only have lost 1 or 2 more in R1 if his opponent hadn't retired) beating AO 2009 (19 games, also including a retirement), with the last 3 AOs (including this one) now being the ones where he has lost the fewest games on his way to R4.

In fact, he has never lost more than 25 games in the first 3 rounds at Melbourne Park (though in two cases, that was because he lost in R1 so only played on match) and he has never lost less than 25 games in the first 3 rounds at any other slam.

It's going to be Melzer in the next round, Baggy retired with a hand injury I hear. Andy leads Melzer 4-0 in the H2H, but they are often tough matches. I haven't seen Andy's match yet, I recorded it overnight and was watching Rafa v Tomic this morning. I couldn't resist checking the score, though!

I was impressed by Tomic by the way. He has a lot of variety and a good tennis brain. I'm never likely to be a fan of his personality from what we hear, but I can see myself watching his matches in future when I can.

BBC say they are showing it on BBC2 at 1.50am; that is assuming the Sod v Dolgo match finished pretty quickly. Maybe be a bit optimistic with that time - but that's better than starting too late and missing some of the match I suppose.

63 61 61

Didn't see all of it but Andy seemed to play ok. Melzer had no penetration on the serve and was left trying to blast unlikely winners; he made some but nowhere near enough. Barely won more than 50% on his own 1st serve!

Saw some of Dolgopolov. He plays like a young Murray though tons of slice on the serve. Which one of them is going to attack? In the fifth set Soderling was a break up then played some of the strangest tennis I've seen for a while. The nerves were clearly getting to Dolgopolov, wasting several match points, yet Soderling was intent on gifting him the match.



-- Edited by kundalini on Monday 24th of January 2011 05:08:21 AM

I do think that was a very good performance from Andy.  Bit disappointing from Melzer in that I feel he did let his head drop a bit ( what John Lloyd said he did much more rarely these days and to be fair he has been in the best form of his life over the last year  ) when his few chances slipped by.

Yes, by top players' strandard Melzer doesn't have a particularly good serve, and it lacks penetration serving just one ace ( though Andy gets a racket there more often than most ).  However, Andy I thought returned well and there were certainly two players involved in Melzer's first serve statistics 

I did think Andy in this match showed the controlled aggresion that many have sought from him, indeed kundalini ( who seems rather underwhelmed ) for one I recall has certainly in the past wanted to see much more aggresion from Andy.  It would have been quite easy to fall into a slight trap of waiting for Melzer to make errors, and while Andy played some points in that vein when he hadn't control of the point, I felt he still say sliced with real thought rather than just aimlessly keeping the rally going.  But much more often he was prepared to trade and indeed be the agressor at times with real penetration.

One thing that Andy did say at the end that while he was rightly very pleased with his performance, he indicated things in tennis can be different on another day. There is some truth in that.  Unfortunately we have had a few occasions when a seemingly inform Andy has just suddenly not produced on a day.  

And the serve, the serve..( my most general moan re Andy ) pretty good today, especially at the end when he was totally confident. I just would feel more confident for the ultimate prizes with a consistently higher first service percentage and indeed it being more reliable in general match to match.

But I''ll put my future worries to the side for now, and Dolgopolov even at his best must be a better quarter final option than a Soderling at his best.

Very well played Andy 

Though the way Soderling was playing in that 5th set, I think Lady Tigress herself would have felt confident of beating Robin/Robby/Robi/Rob/Ro/R so long as she could get her serve in play.

In my defence, I didn't mean to imply that Melzer served poorly, rather that he simply wasn't getting many cheap points and of course Andy's reading of the serve and his skill at returning serve had a lot to do with it.

I suspect I missed most/much of Andy's best tennis as I missed a big chunk of the 2nd set and only saw the first and last games of the first set.