Miscellaneous > Tennis > Gulbis > Jul-Aug 08

Ernests Gulbis

10th August 2008

I'm writing this about half an hour before Gulbis starts the first round of his Olympic quest against Davydenko. I'm sure he is capable of winning, but I haven't the remotest idea regarding the actual outcome of the match. Should he win, then I expect him to at least reach the quarterfinals, where he's likely to come up against either Ferrer or Gonzalez. Such progress might get him seeded in the US Open.

I was impressed with his early round wins in Cincinatti, when he wasn't playing particularly well. However, his loss against Djokovic was a major disappoitnment. It seems as if Gulbis had the greater will to lose on the day. Very sloppy performances by both players, hence my reluctance to forecast the outcome of Gulbis' first match in Beijing.

10th August 2008 (5 hrs later)

Davydenko won 6-4, 6-2, and according to some Gulbis fan who had access to a digital feed, it was mostly due to Gulbis' high error rate. The same old story...

The only online scoring I was able to find provided game outcomes only, so my online Olympics tennis "watching" started and ended with the last five games of this match, as with a minimal data feed one gets no idea of what's actually happening on court.

19th August 2008 (Roland Garros style results ahead?)

Ernests has as good as gone to ground since returning to the USA from Beijing a week ago, as he's not in any tournament ahead of the US Open. Here's what I wrote as a comment on on the importance of being ernests site yesterday:

• Regarding entries for the Pilot Pen tournament, apart from the seemingly inevitable presence of Del Potro (who as I write is a break down but probably on his way to win the final at Washington), it also has Cilic as 6th seed. Marin reached the second round in Beijin, so has had less time than Gulbis to get back into a North American tournaments frame of mind. This situation suggests to me that Ernests may (hopefully) have made alternative arrangements to better prepare himself for Flushing Meadows, similar to his Vienna preparations for Roland Garros.

  I seem to recall that after losing at the Olympics he said that he was jet-lagged. I have no reason to doubt that statement, but how did he manage to get into such a situation ? In stark contrast Djokovic had two more days play at Cincinatti, but still appeared to get to Beijing in plently of time to be properly prepared for the tournament. Maybe Novak flew directly from the USA to China. Gulbis went to Latvia first. Why ?

  I've mentioned Del Potro and Cilic above, which reminded me of a comment I wrote on July 31st to Ricky Dimon's preview on tennistalk.com of the Gulbis / Blake match at Cincinatti. Ricky was predicting that Blake would win in straight sets, and I responded as follows:

  • I think you may be underestimating Gulbis' prospects ever so slightly for this match. You wrote ahead of his opening match that he'd not done very well since Roland Garros - I would refer you to the fact that at Wimbledon he was the only player other than Federer to take a set off Nadal.

    I'm inclined to believe that he gets bored, or otherwise distracted, in the matches against lower ranked players that he's expected to win, resulting in the outcome's being unpredictable. So, seeing that you, Ricky, and probably others, are prediciting a Blake win today, causes me to be more inclined to believe that Gulbis might win.

    A note of caution to those who say that he's still young, and will learn to control his play better. What about Cilic and Del Potro ? They are both a month younger than Gulbis, and both three inches taller to boot. Admittedly I don't see them as having anything near Gulbis's talent, but they do appear to be more mature.

  So please, no more excuses for Ernests !

As long as he can stay away from Nadal and Djokovic in the first three rounds at Flushing Meadows he should have a good chance of matching last year's performance. That's assuming that he's been doing a lot of serious mental and physical preparation since returning to the USA, and that he continues along such a vein till next Monday without nipping back to Latvia to play some football or whatever.

27th August 2008 (US Open rounds 1 and 2)

Below are the words of some of the commentators who think that Gulbis can (or will) beat Roddick in the second round this week. Not one of them mentioned the possibility of Gulbis losing to Johansson in the first round. However, Johansson, as a former top ten singles player with a week old Olympics silver medal for doubles, seems unlikely to be a pushover.

I think it will take a very sound performance from Gulbis for him to reach the second round. To me that appears to be at best a 50/50 proposition. Ernests needs to win convincingly today before I can believe that he will go on to beat Roddick - or Santoro.

• Sean Randall - tennis-x.com - 2008-08-24
  
  I think (new coach Patrick) McEnroe will ignite a spark under Roddick and he'll somehow get through... Get through Fabrice Santoro that is, only to get beat by Gulbis. I really want to believe that Roddick beats Ernests, but it's just an awful match-up for Andy who doesn't do well against guys who have decent serves to go along with solid groundstrokes, and Gulbis has that and a whole lot more.

• Jon Wertheim - si.com - 2008-08-21
  
  The good news for fans: he drew Fabrice Santoro in round one. Roddick ought to win that but Ernests Gulbis lurks in round two.

• Jerry Magee - signsonsandiego.com - 2008-08-24
  
  No other man would seem to have as daunting a draw as No. 8 seed Andy Roddick. For openers, the leading American must deal with the subtleties of veteran Fabrice Santoro of France, then faces possible tests against Ernests Gulbis, a comer from Latvia.

• Ricky Dimon - tennistalk.com - 2008-08-23
  
  Roddick has a lot of work to do, too, before he can even start thinking about the quarterfinals. Tricky veteran Fabrice Santoro greets him in round one, and the wildly-talented but erratic Ernests Gulbis looms in the second.
  
  Rick's Picks:
  
  Third round - Gulbis over Seppi, Kiefer over Gonzalez, Moya over Safin, Djokovic over Cilic
  
  Fourth round - Kiefer over Gulbis, Djokovic over Moya

• Nick Bollettieri - nickstennispicks.com - 2008-08-21
  
  Right now, he [Gulbis] is the "it" guy on the ATP Tour. The only thing that could stop him is if he gets a bad draw like at Wimbledon where he had to face Nadal in the second round.
  
  And, after the draw:
  
  Andy Roddick has a tough start against "The Magician", Fabrice Santoro. Roddick is 2-1 against Santoro, but Santoro did win their last match in 2007. If Roddick can get by that one, he will most likely face the very talented youngster Ernests Gulbis. The two have never faced, but I surely wouldn't be surprised to see Gulbis win, especially if Roddick is still hurting.

I can only hope that Ernests has been too busy with his preparation for the event to read the press, and therefore avoids the risk of complacency setting in, which could result in a seemingly casual (hence disasterous) approach to the tasks ahead.

I was going to add that I couldn't see Gulbis losing to Kiefer in the fourth round (Ricky Dimon's prediction), with the proviso that maybe Ricky has seen Kiefer playing recently, and was very impressed. However that prediction won't be put to the test as Kiefer had to retire in his first round match.

28th August 2008 (Gulbis v Johansson - post mortem)

I'm starting to write this about 30 minutes after the completion of Gulbis' first round victory. I was only able to follow the match via the online "Slam Tracker" and accompanying "Match Stats", so my grasp of what was actually happening was less than that of a blind man listening to a radio commentary. However I did try to write down the sequence of each point won and lost, and also made note of each ace and double fault as they happened. This record is slightly gappy due to a combination of human error, and the occasional hiccup in the data feed, when two or three points sometimes came through together.

In the first set, Ernests was 3-0 up with one break of serve after just ten minutes play. The set then proceeded without break till Gulbis served for the set at 5-3. He started that game with an ace, and then promptly lost ten points in a row. This left him serving at 0-30 with the games at 5-5. (I think he'd managed to fit in four double faults in that spell.) Then he won three points in a row, but still almost lost the game before winning it and then breaking Johansson to take the set 7-5.

In the second set, Gulbis ran up a 5-1 lead before his faulty brain once more tripped him up. Having broken Johansson to love in the previous game, he promptly dropped the first two points of his service game. "Here we go again" I typed, and sure enough Johansson had five or six break points that Gulbis somehow managed to recover before winning the set 6-1.

In the third set, Gulbis seemed to play textbook serving games until the score reached four all. He'd dropped just the one point on serve, only had to serve one second serve, and served no double faults at all. Johansson then saved one break point on his way to a 5-4 lead. During the changeover I wrote "now does EG go walkabout after only losing one point on serve so far this set ???". And of course he did, but fortunately he didn't quite lose the game, which he won (possibly with an ace) after saving one set point. Johansson then served a love game to go ahead 6-5, and then luckily Ernests' earlier moment of madness seemed to have run it's course again, as he brought the score to the tiebreaker without much trouble. The tiebreak started with a mini-break to Gulbis, but this was soon recovered by Johansson, and the game proceeded with serve until Gulbis led 4-3, when it became Johansson's turn to serve again. Maybe Gulbis' extremely erratic performance had begun to infect Johansson by this point, as he may have served two double faults. I'm not quite sure what happened, as the data feed played up at that point. Whatever, Gulbis was serving with three match points, and he won the first.

So, although Gulbis won in straight sets, I'm still not prepared to say with confidence that he'll beat Roddick - although I do think that he has a better chance against Roddick than he would against Santoro, as Roddick seems to have his own demons to contend with at the moment.

• Mats Wilander, writing a Q&A on the Eurosport website yesterday was asked: "Do you know of any teenager who is coming through, like a Rafael Nadal or Richard Gasquet?"
  
  His response was "I think Ernests Gulbis has a really, really big game, but the question is where his head is at so far. But I think he's probably the most talented and the one who has the best resources to break through. Juan Martin Del Potro is starting to play really well and he's very young as well. But it's so mental once you get to a certain stage and it's tough to say how someone like Gulbis will develop mentally."