Game Week 18 Results

I think its fair to say that Game Week 18 was one of those Game Weeks which could quickly be abandoned in the scrap heap.  Even before the tournaments began, the withdrawal list had left many of us with half a team  (Rybakina, Vekic, Bublik, De Minaur and Sakkari were all among the pre tournament withdrawals - a familiar occurrence in a pre slam week)

The big name players that did survive the cull didn't fare much better.  Iga at least managed 3 wins before succumbing to illness prior to her semi final.  Most of the other highly owned participants - (Fritz, Tsitsipas, Haddad Maia, Jabeur) were all early casualties putting a big question mark on their Wimbledon chances.

So at the end of the week we ended up with 4 fairly unexpected finals.  In Eastbourne, Madison Keys (0 owners) won the women's event over Daria Kasatkina (7 initial owners) and in the men's event Cerundolo (8 owners) won his 2nd ATP title and became the first Argentinian to win a grass court event since 1995. Runner up Tommy Paul  was the most owned of the finalists with 28 owners.

It was a first career title for Chris Eubanks  (1 owner) in Mallorca defeating the ever reliable grass stalwart  Adrian Mannarino (18 owners) in the final.  And Katerina Siniakova (2 owners) took the title in Bad Homburg defeating Lucia Bronzetti (1 owner but also crucially 1 ER).

In a game week like this it doesn't take a massive total to finish top of the pops and the winning score of 306.41 was the lowest winning weekly score of the season so far but in the circumstances a darn good total in a tough game week in which most of us failed to break 200 and some of us (including me) failed to break into triple figures. 😄

Massive congrats to Soklian who made the most of a chaotic week.  Here is the final game week table. Congrats also to Harry who is the Level 2 weekly winner.  Great weeks also for Elin, Laurie and also Muhammed who's 5th place propelled him to the top the season leaderboard.

If you manged a finalist this week you were doing well, if you managed TWO like Soklian and Harry, it was enough to win the game week.   Soklian had Eastbourne runner up Tommy Paul as a KP and also Bad Homburg runner up Lucia Bronzetti coming in as an ER for Vekic.  She also had decent returns from Captain Iga and KP Liudmila Samsonova. Here is Soklian's winning team

Here is Harry's team.  Harry ran Soklian pretty close in the end.  He had Eastbourne Champion Cerundolo and Mallorca runner up Mannarino.  Congrats Harry.