The World Tennis League in Abu Dhabi continued with the third match of the second tie of the day as Stefanos Tsitsipas and Grigor Dimitrov took on Daniil Medvedev and Andrey Rublev.
The Russian combo had a lot of work to do because their team was trailing big time after the first two matches, 12-7. Erasing that lead would be quite complicated, so they approached the match very seriously.
Every game matters because of the unique format, which will be explained in the following sentences. Players are paired up in teams of four, with each tie between teams consisting of 5 matches. The duration of a match is one set, with three doubles and two singles matches being played.
Each game won in each match counts as one point, which matters most. At the end of each tie, the winning team is the one that has the most points, meaning the most games won.
Now, because of mathematics, the team that wins three out of five will likely win the tie unless the other team manages to win dominantly 6-0 or 6-1 or something similar.
The match was pretty close from start to finish as both teams dominated on the serve, and there were hardly any chances to break. Dimitrov and Tsitsipas were doing a really good job of keeping the match and not allowing their opponents to reduce the gap between the teams in the overall standings.
They've got a big lead already, and they needed to keep these matches close, and even if they lost, they would still be in a great position to win the tie overall.
In the end, they did lose, but only in the tiebreak, so the harm was very minimal for the overall outlook. The final score was 7-6(5) for Medvedev and Rublev.
0 Comments