stevemcqueen wrote:

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Do we know the official reason for Dan's withdrawal from Quimper?  If he is in good enough shape to take TH to 3 close sets, I don't think he can be nursing an injury.   His efforts in Croatia were fantastic, but Saturday to Tues/Weds should give him plenty of recovery time.  

 I have an idea that he finds top level tennis psychologically draining.  He seemed burnt out after his efforts in the run up to the US Open and the US Open itself.  His performance in the series of three Californian Challengers after the USO was disappointing, I'm sure Dan would admit as much. I watched the whole of his match against Jarmere Jenkins (WR 540) at Tiburon, and he just seemed despondent.  After beating the world no. 12 and the world no 52 in a GS, overcoming  a player ranked outside the top 500 should be straight forward.  

Dan played only 19 tournaments last year, this is very few for a player who has not had any significant injury. Also, 72% of his current points total comes from just 4 tournaments.  There are  nine tournaments where he earned 12 points or less.  His 3rd & 4th best points haul is 60 at Vancouver and Aptos. His fifth best is just 20.  Some  modest but consistent perfomance at Challengers of the next 4 months would be easily enough for him to break into the top 100. Just two Challenger finals and a semi would take care it.   

I hope that his recent success helps him take further big events in his stride. These musings are just observtions and not criticisms. I'm a big fan of Dan;s! 

 

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The drawsheet says "personal" - I'm pretty sure it's simply a case of wanting a few days' rest after playing 18 sets in a week. Without passing judgement either way on what happened in the autumn, I don't think this is anything to worry about - the top players quite frequently pull out of events after reaching a final the previous week (not that they often schedule themselves for consecutive weeks in the first place), and they would have had to play less than 18 sets in the week they reached the final too!

He has also turned it into a positive by going for Marseille ATP qualies, just like he turned the DC situation into a positive by doing so well in Zagreb. Of course, he could have played Quimper and still entered Marseille qualies had he gone out early enough (if he hadn't, he'd be picking up enough points in Quimper to more than compensate), which makes me think being very tired or having injury niggles after a very long week is the most likely reason for the w/d.