On an already rain-soaked day in Washington, all sixteen remaining singles players will be in action. Here are the five matches which should prove to be the most awesome.
15 Mardy Fish (USA) vs 4 Marin Cilic (CRO) — Mardy Fish, despite being a much lower seed, should be the heavy favorite in this one. He’s on an 11-match win streak, a stark contrast to the recently floundering Cilic.
13 Gilles Simon (FRA) vs 2 Andy Roddick (USA) — This is a real tricky match-up for Roddick, to be sure. Simon, who made the top ten and beat Roger Federer twice during his peak in late 2008, looked very impressive in his first match against Igor Kunitsyn, dropping only three games. Roddick’s going to have to force the issue a lot more than he did in his first match if he’s to come away with the win.
3 [WC] Fernando Verdasco (ESP) vs [Q] Ryan Sweeting (USA) — Ryan Sweeting will become the story of the tournament if he can pull off the upset over third-seeded Fernando Verdasco. Sweeting (a Bahamian-born American) has already won four matches in Washington, including main draw wins over James Blake and #14 seed Michael Llodra. Verdasco struggled in his first match of the tournament on Tuesday, needing to stave off two match points before he could put away unseeded Michael Berrer. If Sweeting can come out strong early, he could be able to pull off the biggest upset of the event so far.
[WC] David Nalbandian (ARG) vs Marco Chiudinelli (SUI) — This match won’t be awesome in the sense that it will be close. But it will be awesome in the sense that Nalbandian has been playing more dominant tennis than anybody during this tournament so far (even though this is his first ATP event since April), and he should be able to deliver quite the beatdown to Chiudinelli.
1 Tomas Berdych (CZE) vs 16 Andrey Golubev (KAZ) — In a piece of truly inexplicable scheduling, Tomas Berdych, the #1 seed and recent Wimbledon finalist, is playing his third round match on Court 1, the smallest venue in use today for singles. Golubev shouldn’t prove to be as tough a test for Berdych as Tursunov was yesterday, but either way Berdych is much too big of a name to be relegated to a court that seats about 200.