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  • Las Vegas First-Round Preview: Marat Safin vs. Lleyton Hewitt

    3/3/08 5:39 AM | Ricky Dimon
    - Two players in the Tennis Channel Open have won multiple Grand Slam titles in their careers and they just happen to be facing each other in the first round. Lleyton Hewitt got the second seed in Las Vegas, but he did not get a favorable draw, having to go up against Marat Safin on Monday night.

    Tournament organizers clearly want to this week’s Tennis Channel Open in Las Vegas to start with a bang, putting second-seeded and defending champ Lleyton Hewitt and Marat Safin as the feature match of Monday’s night session. Without a doubt that matchup will produce plenty of hoopla and fanfare, but will it produce good tennis?

    That’s a question that must be asked considering neither Safin nor Hewitt is in particularly good form at the moment. The mercurial Safin is especially mired in struggles. Last fall he briefly entertained thoughts of climbing the 26,906-foot Cho-Oyu Mountain on the Nepal-Tibet border and bagging tennis for the rest of the season, but he soon abandoned those plans. He might as well have gone through with it. His ensuing results included a second-round loss to Igor Andreev (on hard courts, mind you) in Moscow and a first-round setback to Ivo Karlovic at the Masters Series Madrid.

    It hasn’t been any better for the Russian in 2008. He lost to Marcos Baghdatis in the second round of the Australian Open then took a month off before losing his opener last week in Memphis to Thomas Johansson.

    Hewitt has been enduring some poor play of his own. Other than his epic win over Baghdatis in Australia that ended after 4:30 in the morning, he has really struggled this season. Most recently the Australian got caught looking ahead to a potential second-round clash with Rafael Nadal in Rotterdam and he lost to unheralded Andreas Seppi in a third-set tiebreaker.

    Safin and Hewitt have squared off a whopping 12 times in their careers and the head-to-head record is an even 6-6. Hewitt holds a 4-3 edge on hard courts. Their most recent meeting came at this very same Tennis Channel Open in Las Vegas last year. Hewitt, who went on to win the title, prevailed 7-5, 6-1 in a semifinal battle.

    Safin obviously has more talent and the much bigger game, but Hewitt is a grinder who makes a living on getting balls back and making opponents beat themselves. When going up against out-of-form players, like Safin, that’s almost always a recipe for success.

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