Season Leaderboard after Game Week 11

 

Fedex Superstars (Muhammad) are still hanging on to 1st place but Thanks But No Shanks closed the gamp to just 6 points after an excellent 10th place finish in the game week.

No change in positions 3 to 5 as Prepare for Czech Mate (Tricia), Metty's Marvels (Graham) and FC Vepyrite (Silvi) maintain their good start to the season but they didn't make any ground on the top 2.

The big mover within the top 10 is Arnodinho who moved up 4 places to 6th spot after an impressive 11th place finish in the game week.  The Champs (Marc Sab) moves up 2 spots to 7th.

Game Week 11 - Final Leaderboard

 

For those FTLers who pay attention to recent tennis history, this week should have been a pretty good one as we ended up with 6 of the same finalists from the equivalent events last year and 3 of the same champions!  It was also a week when some managers decided to drop some big players in the expectation that they may withdraw or lose early. Some of these gambles paid off. Some spectacularly failed!

It was the same final and the same outcome in Munich as Holger Rune defended his title in a remarkable match against Botic Van de Zandschulp.  But it could have been oh so different with Botic being a double break up in the deciding set and Rune seemingly compromised by a shoulder injury and then an ankle injury. Botic became too passive however and allowed the young Dane to claw his way back into the set and clinch the win in the tie break leaving a visibly crestfallen Botic to look on as Holger collected his BMW (has he passed his test yet) and the obligatory lederhosen!!

And it was same story in another part of Germany as Iga Swiatek cruised to a straight sets win over Aryna Sabalenka winning another Porsche for her collection.  Aryna grudgingly congratulated Iga on winning another car before asking if they could have 2 cars next year as she had been runner up 3 times in a row now. She insisted she would keep coming back until she won the car before taking a jestful swipe at the car with her racquet as Iga was being shown to the door.  She really really REALLY wanted that car.

And it was the same champ again in Barcelona as an imperious Carlos Alcaraz cruised to a comfortable win over a magnanimous Stefanos Tsitsipas before taking the obligatory pool jump!

The only champ from last year not to defend his title was Andrey Rublev but to be fair the event had been moved from Serbia to Bosnia so perhaps that upset the cosmic balance in terms of history repeating itself.  What a week it turned out to be though for Dusan Lajovic who defeated Djokovic and Kecmanovic en route to defeating Rublev in the final. Shout out to Emi at this stage for being the only person to play Lajovic which turned out to be pivotal to her win in the FTL Cup!

So over to FTL and its a massive congrats to Mark McDonald who was top dog this game with an oustanding score of 526.97 points. Mark had 3 of the 4 champs in Alcaraz (Capt), Swiatek (KP) and Rune (TP) as well as runners up Tsitsipas and Sabalenka.  He also had decent points from leftfield pick Alex Molcan which ultimately proved very valuable.

Congrats also to Craig Miller who finished a tantalising 4 points behind 1st place. Craig actually had the same winners and runners up as Mark and a further runner up in Rublev. But FTL is a game of very small margins and crucial decisions and ultimately it was the placement of Djokovic a Captain that ultimately cost Craig the weekly win.

Asier Fernandez and Andy Riel were both pretty close to the top of the pile too. Both had 3 winners and 2 runners up.  Andy had a great pick with Botic in the Munich event.

Sagar Chowdhry, Tony, Yoann and Pete Schaumann all cleared 500 points for the game week. Well done to all.

Here is the final weekly table and winning team!

OVERALL LEADERBOARD - as of MonteCarlo

In a season thats been as topsy turvy at the top as the Rublev-Rune MonteCarlo Final, it looks like we finally have a bit of a smooth patch. Can it continue?

Aoun (Fedex Superstars) continues to lead, but his lead was trimmed to 74 points.  He had 3 out of the 4 SemiFinalists, but sadly the one player he didnt have, Rublev, went on to win the title.  He finished 36th for the week which was plenty good enough for him to hold onto the lead, but not good enough to open up more ground as some of the chasers had exceptional weeks.

Speaking of exceptional weeks, Robyn (Thanks But No Shanks) moved up 2 places and now sits in 2nd thanks to a 6th place finish.  She had all 4 SF and was lucky enough to have Van Assche withdraw so Musetti could replace him as her ER1!. Tricia (Prepare for Czech Mate) moved up 3 places and now sits in 3rd thanks to a 12th place finish.  She had 3 SF (but didnt have Rublev) and had Musetti as a DH.  Martin (Spotec23) moved up 11 places and now sits in 6th thanks to a 4th place finish.  He captained Sinner, had 3 of the 4 SF (didnt have Rune) and had Struff as his DH!!!.

Sadly one of our previous leaders, Graham (Metty's Marvels) dropped 2 spots and now sits in 4th as he had one of those weeks you would like to forget.  He had 3 R1 losses, and altho he had the foresight not to bring in Djoker, he only ended up with 1 SF.  As a result, he finished 101st for the week.

MONTECARLO FINAL RESULTS

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)

FTL Cup Knockout Round 1

 The 1st knockout round of the FTL Cup will take place in Game Week 11.

A few "local derbies" in there!

Look out for:

Ball Baez (Oli)  v   MachiaVekic  (Preston)

Bullyeye (Pete) v  Intersteller Overdrive (Michele)

New Calc Aces (Matthieu)  v  Natere Dream 2023 ( Marc)

Game Week 11 draws

 Here are the draws for Game Week 11

4 events taking place next week.

WTA 500 Stuttgart

ATP 500 Barcelona

ATP 250 BMW Open Munich

ATP 250  Srpska Open (Banja Luka)

Season Leaderboard after Game Week 9

Here is the season leaderboard afer Game Week 9.

Muhammad Aoun Abbas replaces Metty's Marvels at the top of the pile after a great 10th place finish in Game Week 9. Силви Георгиев and Robyn Brailey both move up 2 places to 3rd and 4th respectively.  Marc Sab and Tricia drop 2 places to 5th and 6th respectively.

And we have three new entrants into the top 10. Matthew Markman moves up 3rd places to 8th. Davide Giulietti (Crimini) moves up 9 places to 9th and Sebastian Kromberg is up 10 places to 10th!

There are around 500 points separating the top 40 or so teams so its all still pretty tight as we enter the clay swing.