The match was awesome. I couldn’t watch it live though I really wanted to as I had a feeling this was going to be cracker, but unfortunately I am slightly under the weather and a couple of nighttime Advils completely knocked me out by 10pm on Saturday night. There were some ups and downs on both parts but hitting was clean and spectacular. It’s a great match up. Dimitrov looked extremely pumped up from the get-go and was playing at a very high level but then got all tight in the 9th game, where he was supposed to close out the set but instead got broken right away. But he put the pressure back on to Andy’s serve right after when Andy was trying to level things up in the 1st set and pushing it to a TB but Andy held in the end quite nicely. The TB was a total demolition job from Andy and not to mention, very one sided. Dimitrov didn’t have a clue as to what was happening and I felt he was still sort of stuck on the fact that, he got broken when he could have easily had that set and now he was facing a TB and down a few points already.
Dimitrov though didn’t give up in the 2nd set which was nice to see and surprise, surprise, it was again Andy who had another mental lapse in the 7th game and gave Dimitrov yet another lead to 4-3 by playing really sloppy, but he came back very, very strong in the next game and broke Dimitrov back immediately. Andy then held his serve with a lot of authority in the next game. Both games were so strong from Andy that it threw Dimitrov slightly off causing him two double faults in a row.
Of course experience and variety prevailed in the end. I like Dimitrov but what was evident in his game was the fact that, once his confidence level is shaken, he becomes very error prone just like Federer and it’s not pretty. He also has a very good serve but it was still Andy who served 5 aces in the 1st set as opposed to Dimitrov who had only 1 ace. Great match otherwise, really.
And great start for Andy.
