Events / Editor / 30 April 2007 /

ust a week to go to the fourth of this year's Masters Series events, the Internazionali BNL d'Italia - commonly known as the Rome Masters.

It's the first of two more back-to-back Masters events with the Hamburg Masters straight after. This year's Masters series started with back-to-back events on the hard courts of Indian Wells and Miami.

Now it's clay time and with Rafael Nadal having already added to his Indian Wells win by taking the Monte Carlo Masters - for a third year running - everyone is out to try to stop the 20-year-old from Majorca.

At last year's Rome event he came back from a 7-0 tie-break reverse in the first set against Roger Federer to win 7-6 in the fifth set, saving two match points in the final set at 5-6.

That's the closest Federer has come to beating Nadal on clay, as he trails 7-3 in head-to-head encounters. It was an epic contest lasting five hours and five minutes and victory saw Nadal equal Guilermo Vilas's Open era record of 53 consecutive wins on clay.
It was also the second year in a row that the final at Foro Italica had been decided by a fifth set tie-break, Guillermo Coria beating Daniel Nestor in five hours 14 minutes in 2005.

Victory in the Seat Open in Barcelona yesterday has now seen that winning streak stretched to 72 matches, following his quick demolition of Guillermo Canas 6-3 6-4 on Sunday.

That gave Nadal another title hat-trick and made him only the second player in the event's 55-year history to do so - Mats Wilander won three in a row from 1982-84.

It gave Nadal his 20th ATP title and left him with a 15-0 record in clay-court finals going into next week's Rome action. He even came close to adding the doubles title in Barcelona, only losing in the final when he and Bartolome Salva-Vidal lost 6-3 7-6 to fourth seeds Andrei Pavel and Alexander Waske.

This week the action continues in Portugal at the Estoril Open, where Nikolay Davydenko, Tommy Robredo, Novak Djokovic and Fernando Gonzalez are the top four seeds. Over in Munich at the BMW Open, the line-up is not surprisingly dominated by a strong German entry. Tommy Haas, world number nine, is the highest-ranked player in the line-up with Czech ace Tomas Berdych (world number 15) also in there along with Marcos Baghdatis of Cyprus. Belgium's Olivier Rochus, the world number 36 from Belgium, is the defending champion.

These two events will be vital clay-court warm-ups for Rome where all the big guns are out and ready to fire. Britain's Andy Murray, who pulled out of Barcelona last week to recover from his Davis Cup back injury, hopes to be fit and another week's rest is expected to do the trick.
The line-up also includes Andy Roddick and James Blake, the top two Americans, who have been taking it easy over the last few weeks.
Roddick had to retire with a leg injury at 5-3 down against Murray in their Miami quarter-final and has played just one Davis Cup match in the win over Spain at the start of April since mid-March.

Blake won both his Davis Cup matches following the Miami Masters, where he fell in the second round. But since then has only tackled the Houston clay-court event, where he lost to Argentina's Mariano Zabaleta in the semi-finals.

So both the Americans come into the European clay-court season with just four clay-court matches between them. Rome and Hamburg offer their only real chances of sharpening their game before the French Open at Roland Garros at the end of May.

Despite the presence of all the top 30 in Rome - that's how strong the event is - it's hard to look beyond Nadal. The stats all point to him as he looks to keep this amazing winning streak going right through to Paris - a third consecutive French Open title, in the week of his 21st birthday, is what he really wants.

Only Federer looks to have the weaponry to stop him - but he has yet to win a Masters title this year after those two upsets against Canas in Indian Wells and Miami. Maybe Djokovic, the 19-year-old Serbian who beat Canas to take the Miami Masters title, may just be the one to threaten any sort of upset. Nadal beat him in straight sets to win the Indian Wells title. Djokovic gained a confidence-boosting win over Nadal in the quarter-finals in Miami although that wasn't on clay!

Several markets will emerge on Betfair closer to the Masters tournament, with the Rome Masters due to get underway on May 7.

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