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  • ABN AMRO Preview: Top Half of the Draw

    2/18/08 2:27 PM | Ricky Dimon
    ABN AMRO Preview: Top Half of the Draw At the ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament this week, Rafael Nadal is making his first appearance since losing to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the semifinals of the Australian Open. Nadal is the top seed in Rotterdam, but he will have to navigate his way through an extremely difficult top half of the draw if he hopes to make his way to the final.

    While the clay-court events in South America are still in full swing and the U.S. hard-court stretch is heating up as it makes its way to the Masters Series tournaments in Indian Wells and Miami, the top players remain in Europe this week. The ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament boasts an incredibly strong field of contestants and the top half of the draw looks especially brutal.

    Rafael Nadal, the top seed, is playing for the first time since the Australian Open. He won’t have any time to work on getting back in the swing of things, however, as the Spaniard has been dealt a tough opening-round matchup with Dmitry Tursunov. If Nadal is lucky enough to survive the Russian, he will most likely face two-time Grand Slam champion Lleyton Hewitt in his next match. Eighth-seeded Marcos Baghdatis looms large as a potential quarterfinal opponent.

    Like Nadal, Baghdatis will have to play great tennis just to make it that far. In the first round the Cypriot has to face Robin Soderling, a quarterfinalist last week in Marseille. The winner of that showdown will get whoever emerges from another enticing opening-round clash between Fernando Verdasco and Jarkko Nieminen.

    The bottom section of the top half does not appear to be quite as chaotic. The top seed in that part of the draw is No. 4 Mikhail Youzhny, who has to be considered the favorite to make it through to the semifinals. Even for the Russian, however, it will no be easy right from the start. In fact his first-round match could be his toughest prior to the semifinals, as he has to face Serb Janko Tipsarevic, who—as everyone remembers—took Roger Federer to 10-8 in the fifth in Australia. In addition to Tipsarevic, Marseille quarterfinalist Gilles Simon and seventh-seeded Juan Carlos Ferrero look like potential threats for Youzhny in that section of the draw.

    Overall, the top half of the ABN AMRO draw offers a crowd-pleasing blend of veteran stars—some who are searching for their games (Hewitt, Feliciano Lopez, and Tommy Robredo), and others who are looking to sustain the momentum from recent encouraging performances (Nadal, Baghdatis, Nieminen, and Youzhny).

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