I'd like to throw out a massive kuddos to our event winners this week - Aryna Sabalenka and Jakub Mensik.
I'd love to tell you that their victories were the main stories of the week, but it couldn't be further from the truth. There were 2 stories that were far more prevalent.
1. Alexandra Eala
2. The state of the mens top 10
First things first. Aryna may have been dominant, but Alexandra Eala was THE STORY of the womens event. She's received nothing but hate over the past few years about her continuously receiving undeserving MDWC's in incredibly high level events, and its hard to pretend that the hate didn't feel warranted - It was hard to remember her ever being competitive in one of those matches. Meanwhile, all she did this week was beat 3 Grand Slam Champions (Jelena Ostapenko, Madison Keys, and Iga Swiatek) and make the SEMIFINAL!! She may have lost the Semi to Jessica Pegula, but it wasn't for lack of effort, nor was it for the match being noncompetitive! In fact, she had the first set on her racquet and felt like the better player for most of the 3rd against Jess. Most analysts believed that her match with Jessica was the match of the tournament.
For those that have never seen Eala play, she's nothing like you would expect. Alexandra is a lefty and is diminutive in stature, but is incredibly aggressive. Her serve needs some serious work, but she takes the ball early, and has zero issue changing the direction of the ball and putting her opponent under pressure. It was shocking to see how many 50-50 rally balls that she was involved with against Pegula and Swiatek, where it felt like she was the one that was in control. When she beat Swiatek in straight sets, Swiatek didn't have her best day, but she wasn't horrible and although she served over 65% first serve, she still only managed to hold serve twice in the entire match thanks to Eala's incredibly aggressive play.
Meanwhile, the top of the mens game is a tough tough watch. Jannik Sinner has played in 1 event all season (the Aussie Open) and STILL leads the ATP Race! Shaky play and early exits is how you would describe the top of the mens tour right now. In Miami this type of form continued as Carlos Alcaraz, Daniil Medvedev, Jack Draper and Andrey Rublev lost their first match of the week. Somehow it didn't get much better either as Stefanos Tsitsipas, Casper Ruud, Alexander Zverev, and Alex De Minaur all lost early as well! Taylor Fritz lost in the Semi's to the eventual winner (which he's now done 3 times in his past 4 events!) but hasn't looked anywhere close to a top 4 player like his ranking would suggest!, and Novak Djokovic lost in the Finals but never beat a single player that wasn't either one of his pigeons or would be described as someone that belongs on the same court as him. Honestly, it was rather shocking to see Novak not take advantage of a player looking for his first title of his career in such a huge match!
Now lets discuss Aryna Sabalenka. Her victory this week was the definition of dominance! She beat 3 top 10 players (Jessica Pegula, Jasmine Paolini, Qinwen Zheng) and the defending Champion (Danielle Collins) and never lost a set all week. The only question coming into the final was if she was going to lose in the final for the 3rd time this season (Madison Keys at the AO and Mirra Andreeva at the IW), but Aryna was truly amazing in the final against Jess. Its hard to pretend that Jessica hadn't played 3+ more hours of tennis than Aryna had before the final started, so she was truly on her last legs, but considering Aryna's level, I don't think it mattered. Jessica has now lost to Aryna in 3 massive Hard Court finals (Cincinnati, US Open and Miami) in the past 6 months! Safe to say that Jessica is going to have to go back to the drawing board and figure out a different game plan for the next time they face off! Meanwhile, Aryna's dominance this week helped increase the gap in her ranking to 3000+ points ahead of Iga Swiatek! Iga's got 4000+ points to defend from not until the French Open, so this gap could actually increase!
Somehow lost in the shuffle this season even after his win is Jakub Mensik. Many an analyst have been incredibly high on him for the past year, but Joao Fonseca's crazy peak level has put some serious shade on his hype train! Hell both players were involved in the nextgen finals in December and Fonseca came out on the right side of a 5 set war between the 2! To make matters worse, he really struggled to win tiebreaks that week (losing 7 of them!) and lost all 3 of his matches (pretty damn good list of players btw - Arthur Fils, Learner Tien) Coming into this week, his hype continued to dwindle as he's struggled for the vast majority of the season - he'd only made the R16 once all year! But when you are 19 and you have all the talent in the world, all it takes is 1 good week to remind everyone that the sky is the ceiling! All he did this week was beat 3 top 10 players (Novak Djokovic, Taylor Fritz, Jack Draper) and get revenge over Arthur Fils on the way to his first title of his career!! On the way to the title he showed that he wasn't scared of the tiebreak lol, as he won all 7 of them that he played!!! Whats crazy about this result is that when the match was over, the discussion wasn't about how good Jakub was, but instead did Djoker really just lose this match? Last year, Jakub looked like he had top 10 potential and after this win, his ranking is now inside the top 25, so I think its a safe bet that this won't be the last time we hear from him this year. I'm curious to see how he fares on the dirt!
In terms of FTL, I'd like to give massive kuddos to our winner - Michael Blomer (ThunderTurkeys). He amassed an incredible 625.95 points
Michael won the week by a little over 8 points, which takes some doing when your Womens Dark Horse loses in Round 1! He had both Womens Finalists and had Fritz make the Semi's to makeup for that issue. His selection of Grigor Dimitrov as his Dark Horse helped make up for the Round 1 loss by his KP (Carlos Alcaraz). As a result of this week, he's now taken over the lead for March. Can he close the job done and close the door? (its less than 4 points, so it won't be easy)
Vlad (Rafa) finished a close second and I'm sure he's just wondering what could/should have been as he had bad losses by Alexander Zverev, and Stefanos Tsitsipas
I'd like to give a shoutout for the rest of our Top 5 for the week.
3rd. Taylor - Stripes VIII
4th. Ceprin - АльфА
5th. Mike Hunt - No AO No Problem