What to Watch this week: The Race for Seeds Heats Up
The rankings will look very strange on Monday. Because the schedule is a little different this year (as we looked at a few weeks ago), the points players earned in Rome last year will drop this week. Players will actually be able to count an extra 250 (but not 500) score for that week as there will have only been 7 mandatory Masters 1000 tournaments in the past 52 weeks. Next week players will get to add their scores from Madrid, so the extra 250 will be dropped. Since Madrid is a week earlier this year than last, the May 9th rankings will actually count both the Madrid tournaments from this year and last year. Once May 16th rolls around, the rankings will be back to only counting tournaments once.
Now, there is a very good reason to care about rankings at this time of year. The rankings are used to determine the seeding at every tournament (except Wimbledon, but there is also usually very little variation between the rankings and seeding there as well). Thus, players want to do as well as possible over the next two weeks to get the best seed they can at Roland Garros.
There are some important cutoffs in the seeding. Since the draw is determined by lottery, it is not a given that the highest-ranked player will face the lowest-ranked player in the first round. In fact, it is not even guaranteed that the #2 be scheduled to play the #3 in the semifinals (should both get that far, obviously). What is a given is that the #1 and #2 seeds cannot reach each other until the finals. It is also guaranteed that the #3 and #4 seeds get their own quarter (i.e. they cannot meet another one of the top 4 seeds until the semifinals at the earliest). No one in the top 8 can meet another top 8 seed until the quarterfinals, etc.
So, the main battles that we will be looking at and that the players will be very conscious of are who will be #2 and who will be #4. To a lesser extent players will also fight to be #8 instead of #9 and #16 instead of #17, but there are so many points to be gained at a Masters event that almost anyone in the top 15 can reach #8 with good runs in the next two weeks (and almost anyone in the top 60 could reach #16). We will only look at what the players within striking distance need to do to get to #2 and #4.
The race for World #2 is down to a two-man race between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer. Djokovic has a 1090-point lead and only has 180 points to defend these next two weeks. Federer, on the other hand, had 610 points to defend since he reached the final in Madrid last year. Federer needs to win both tournaments to even have a chance at being the #2 seed at Roland Garros. Djokovic only needs to reach one final in the next two weeks or two semifinals to lock up the #2 spot. It looks very much like there is a 50-50 chance at having Federer and Nadal being in the same half of the French Open draw this year.
Andy Murray has a 730-point lead on Robin Soderling for World #4. Murray has 270 points to defend at Madrid and Rome while Soderling only has 100. This battle will be one to keep an eye on as you can bet that neither one of these two wants a chance to play Nadal in the quarterfinals. It is also close enough that one good run by Soderling can make it very interesting. Soderling has struggled since March of this year and now would be a great time for him to start turning things around. Also, David Ferrer and Tomas Berdych can both technically reach #4 before the French Open, but either one would need to win the titles in both Madrid and Rome to have a chance.
Also, keep an eye on Milos Raonic in the coming weeks. He has been playing a lot of tennis recently and retired in the Estoril semifinal with an apparent back injury. We hope that he is okay and will be very disappointed if he is not 100% for Wimbledon.