The Game Week following a slam is always tricky, but the week following the US Open seems to always be a huge ask. The top players have played in 2 Master 1000 events, and a Grand Slam in the past 5 weeks, and the last thing they are doing is looking for a place to play. The difficulty of GW27 was magnified even further as no ATP events were on the schedule.
With that being said, I'd like to offer a huge kuddos to our event winners - Ashlyn Krueger and Barbora Krejcikova.
Ashlyn's maiden victory in Osaka was hard to see coming - She didn't have a single WTA Tour level Main Draw win all season. She has had some success on the challenger tour tho! - she won a 125K event on the grass in June and made a SF in a 100K event in Granby in July. Ashlyn won the event in style tho as she did so without losing a set all week. As a result of her victory, her ranking jumped 50 spots and she now sits in 73rd in the WTA Rankings. It will be interesting to see what she does for the remainder of the season.
Barbora Krejcikova's victory in San Diego was hard to see coming as well - she had lost her last 4 matches and did so without winning a single set. Honestly, she hasn't looked right since declaring that she should be discussed with Swiatek, Sabalenka n Rybakina after she won the event in Dubai. Krejcikova wasn't anywhere near as dominant as Krueger was in Osaka, but Ashlyn had a much softer draw - Barbora beat Kalinina, Haddad Maia, Collins and Kenin on the way to her title.
In terms of FTL, the Game Week proved as difficult as expected as 5 of the 8 seeds in San Diego lost their first match, and only 2 of those winners won a 2nd match. There wasn't quite as much chaos in Osaka, but in the bottom half of the draw there was only 1 seed that won a match and she was eliminated in her next match (Ashlyn Krueger took full advantage).
Wonders of Igaland (Emi) was our victor this week as she amassed an incredible 297.695 points. Her total may not sound spectacular, but there was only 12 other managers that eclipsed the 200 point barrier. Its pretty rare to win a GW without having a single player win a title, but she managed to do so, as she had a finalist (Lin Zhu) and 2 Semi Finalists (Danielle Collins and Xinyu Wang) all selected as Key Players. She won the week by nearly 20 points.
I'd like to offer a huge shoutout to one of our Rookie Managers (Sindre), as he finished second. Thats a hell of an accomplishment especially in such a tough week.
Bits and Pieces (Kenneth), Roger That (Mikhail) and The Champs (Marc Sab) round out our top 5. Sadly none of them were within 45 points of our winner.
