There were two big tournaments over the past week, ATP 500 events in Basel, Switzerland and Valencia, Spain.
Valencia marked the first piece of ATP action World #4 and British #1 Andy Murray has seen since his 4th round exit at the US Open in August (excluding his participation in Britain's loss to Poland in the Davis Cup – which is a non-ATP event 
) after injury forced him to miss two scheduled Asian Tournaments (including the Shanghai Masters). After a 6 week lay-off from competition Murrays victory at Valencia was never a particular surety to me, despite his status as top seed at the event. Nevertheless Murray prevailed, and although his form wasn’t quite 100% throughout the tournament he battled through a tough SF against home crowd favourite Fernando Verdasco en route to a relatively easy looking final against unexpected (and unseeded) finalist Mikhail Youzhny (who himself battled past compatriot and Shanghai Masters champ Nikolay Davydenko in his SF). In the end Murray took the title 6-3, 6-2 in the final, his 6th of the season and 13th ATP level career title.
Over in Basel the field was slightly stiffer with both World #1 Roger Federer (a Basel native) and #3 Novak Djokovic competing. Seeded first and second respectively both made it to the finals in a rematch of their recent clash at the Cincinnati Masters prior to the US Open which Federer won in a comfortable two sets. I had personally thought this would be Federers for the taking – I was to be surprised. The Basel final began 45 mins prior to Valencia, I fully expected it to be over by the end of the first set in Valencia, this was not to be the case as Djokovic took the first set 6-4 before Federer bit back taking the second 6-4, but it proved to be a mere delaying action as Djokovic managed a double break in the decider taking the set and the championship 6-2. A shame for Federer who was looking for his 4th successive title in front of his home crowd.
Djokovic actually had to save 3 match points in his SF against Radek Stepanek on Saturday, so for him to have come back and taken the title in the end is rather impressive.
This coming week sees the final open-entry tournament on the ATP calendar for 2009, the ATP 100 Masters in Paris. With 1000 juicy points on offer this is the last chance the guys in the top 12 have to advance their rankings into the 7 and 8 slots (currently occupied by Nikolay Davydenko and Fernando Verdasco) and qualify for the Tour Finals in London in two weeks time. The field is tough however as Paris is one of the 8 (of 9) Masters tournaments the top 30 players in the world are required to play (except in case of injury), and those players aiming to qualify for London not currently in a position to do so will need to reach at least the final in Paris to stand a chance – this means potentially that they would have to defeat two top 4 players in the process – no easy task.
Incidentally, if you’re as nuts about Tennis as me then this might interest you for the 2010 season: http://challenge.atpworldtour.com/
It’s an interesting competition, you attempt to guess the entire draw for a variety of ATP tour and Grand Slam events, each correct pick nets you points that contribute to a leader board. After a year of events the player at the top of the leader board wins a VIP trip to the tour finals. There are also prizes for a couple of runners-up and additional prizes in the unlikely event that someone makes a 100% perfect draw for any of the events during the year.
Unfortunately as I only found out about this on Saturday my chances of winning anything this year are pretty much nil, but I gave Paris a go. So far I’ve made 6 correct picks out of 11 matches, that ranks me 6984th out of 10065 btw 
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Hopefully they’ll run it again next year and I’ll have a chance at winning some tickets for the 2010 finals. As for this year, Helen already won us tickets to London 
freedoms_stain, still going to LONDON BABY!, out.
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