The MonteCarlo Masters 1000 is one of the clay court events that Rafa Nadal has won at least 10 times in his glorious career. In the past 18 years, there had only been 4 winners (Djoker, Wawrinka, Fognini and Tsitsipas) of this glorious event outside of the King of Clay. Sadly both Rafa and Alcaraz were forced to withdrew due to injury. As a result, Djoker became a huge fave to win the title even tho MonteCarlo has been his kryptonite for quite sometime as he's failed to reach the SF since 2015!
The FTL Managers spit in the face of Djoker's history in MonteCarlo and over a 110 managers made him their captain, sadly their faith in him wasn't rewarded as Djoker's struggles here continued and he played an awful match in the R16 - kuddos to Musetti for taking advantage of it tho!
Once Djoker was eliminated, there were 2 huge questions that were being asked, Can Tsitsipas win here for the 3rd straight time, and Medvedev cant really win a clay court Masters event, can he? The answer to these questions came via a resounding thud in the QF as both players were beaten quite soundly.
In the final, we had Rune (who was looking to become the 2nd player in HISTORY to win both the Paris Masters and the MonteCarlo Masters) and Rublev (who was looking to win his first Masters event). It was an incredibly topsy-turvy match that looked like Holger was going to win with a dominant 3rd set, but once he failed to convert a break chance to take a 5-1 lead, the match was quickly turned on its head as Rublev won 7-5 in the 3rd. Holger will have nightmares of the 5all game where he gave away the break of serve with a Double Fault and 2 Djoker Smash specials into the net. Rublev's been one of the most well-liked players on tour for quite some time, so his win was extremely well received by both the fans and his fellow ATP players.
Now to our FTL results, we had a first year manager come away with the victory - Gordon Trailers (Gord). He's had a team that's essentially ATP based all season, and he took advantage this week with there not being a WTA event on the schedule. You know you are in good shape when 3 SF's are set, and with the last QF to be played, you have 5 players left! He amassed an incredible 517 points for the week.
Because there were was only one event going on this week, the disparity between the managers was fairly small. as there were 10 managers (interestingly enough every one of them had Rublev for the week) that were within 50 points of our winner. No AO, No Problem (Mike) finished 2nd just 8.7 points behind, sadly Musetti's victory over Djoker ended up being something that he couldn't overcome. I had my best week of the season and finished 3rd. Sadly my plan to trade out Fritz n bring in Ruud had egg all over my face as Fritz made the SF. (so much for my thought that Fritz would lose to Stan Wawrinka in his first match of the week hahaha)
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