Michael wrote:

---

Thats just poor from Alex. If he wants to break the top 100 he has to beat these sort of people when these sort of points are on offer.

---

It was disappointing but I think we've been guilty since Mons of expecting Alex to win every challenger he enters. Problem is that there are no easy matches in challengers, Huta Galung has been on fire this week. A lot of people here will have seen how well Labadze played at Wimbledon - the guy reached rd4 and gave Nadal a close match and Huta Galung beat him 6-3, 6-2 in rd2. Alex wasn't at his best and he didn't return well enough today but it's still extremely promising to see him regularly making the latter stages of challengers - he's made 9 quarter-finals this year which superb, especially as 7 have come abroad. Look at Alex's ITF stats and you'll see that he normally doesn't make more than a couple of quarters in challengers per year.

He's made good progress towards the top 100, if he can defend those Shrewsbury points there'll be a good chance that he'll be ranked about 110 at the end of the year which will be excellent and a great base to work from in 2007. The world doesn't end if he doesn't make the top 100 by the end of 2006. This time last year he was outside the top 200.