The 2010 Australian Open Tennis Championship gets underway on the 18th January and concludes on 31st January with the Men’s Singles Final.
It is the first tennis Grand Slam of the year and for many of the players it is their favourite tournament, due to the fun atmosphere created by the half a million spectators that visit Melbourne Park each year.
Reigning Australian Open singles champion is Rafael Nadal, who won his first hard court Grand Slam following a titanic five set battle with his nemesis, Roger Federer .
In the wake of his Australian success, Nadal won three Masters title’s at Indian Wells, Monte Carlo and Rome, putting him just one title behind Federer on 15. However, tennis in 2009 for Nadal went steadily downhill after those wins, due in the main to injury. He reached the Madrid Masters final, where he lost to Federer for the first time on clay. Then at the French Open, a tournament he had won for the last four years and one where he had never been beaten, he was sensationally knocked out by Swede, Robin Soderling in the fourth round. The defeat ended his chance of emulating the great Bjorn Borg of five straight French Open wins. It was confirmed afte that event that Nadal was suffering from tendinitis in both knees and that he would need to take some time out from the tour.
The injury in fact kept him out of tennis for almost three months thus preventing him from defending his grass court titles at both Queens and Wimbledon. Despite playing a number of tournaments since then, Nadal has failed to win any and it has become clear that he will need time to regain his top form. At the recent World Tour Finals, regarded as the next biggest tournament behind the Grand Slams, he failed to win a single match, being eliminated in the ‘round robin’ stage. However he remains number two in the world, but only just as he has Serb, Novak Djokovic , Britain’s Andy Murray ‘and Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina breathing down his neck’.
Federer of course went on to claim Nadal’s crown in the 2009 French Open, becoming the first man since Rod Laver to have won all four Grand Slams. He also equalled the Pete Sampras record of fourteen Grand Slams, which he was to pass just six weeks later when he won Wimbledon for the sixth time after an epic final set against America, Andy Roddick.
Federer also reached the final of the US Open, but failed narrowly to win that title for a sixth straight time losing to the world number five, Del Potro in the final.
Federer has won the Australian Open three times in 2004, 2006 and 2007 and will start favourite to do so again in 2010, but he knows that Grand Slams are becoming tougher to win and that he will have to be at his very best to do so.
Djokovic was champion in Australia in 2008, but despite a great last six months on the tour which has seen him win five titles, he has yet to make another Grand Slam final, but many think that he has made significant improvements in 2009 and will be one of the men to beat here.
Murray is rapidly becoming the ‘also ran’ of Grand Slam tennis. Other than the 2008 US Open final, which he lost to Federer, he has not made a single final. His best 2009 Grand Slam performance was reaching the semi final at the 2009 Wimbledon, where he was found wanting against the experienced American, Andy Roddick. Murray has proven he has what it takes to beat the best players in the world, but in each of the 2009 Grand Slams he was beaten by a player lower than him in the world rankings. Fernando Verdasco beat him in the Australian Open, Fernando Gonzalez in the French, Roddick at Wimbledon and world number 13, Marin Cilic at the US Open.
Nikolay Davydenko, who is the world number six player, won the prestigious World Tour Final in London at the end of the season, defeating Del Potro in the final. The win proved that Davydenko will also be a lively contender to win his first Grand Slam and goes to Melbourne in the form of his life.
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