What a sensational start of the London campaign for Novak Djokovic and Stan Wawrinka. Both surprise the crowd beating Cilic and Berdych with the same nasty result: 6-1 6-1.
Wawrinka
The first match was between Stan and Tomas Berdych. Wawrinka was coming out a rather bad period to never manage to win more than 1 match in the last 4 tournaments losing in the openers in Tokyo, Shanghai and Basel to low-ranked players. So everybody was thinking he was the sacrificial lamb in the group. Right? Wrong! Stan annihilated Berdych in 58 minutes 6-1 6-1 scoring 59 points vs. Tomas’ 29. There was no match whatsoever. Match Stats.
This is the 5th consecutive time that Berdych loses in round robins showing a terrible 0-5 record.
After the match Wawrinka commented “I didn’t expect to win that easy. But I was ready to play well. I had a great week of preparation. Even if the result wasn’t there in Basel and Paris, I was feeling the ball really well on the practice court. When I feel good on the court, I’m ready to beat everybody. It’s never easy, but you have to fight for it.”
Djokovic
“You win 6-1 6-1 in 58 minutes? I do it in 56!”, this is what Nole did against Cilic. The Serbian was eager to show he is still the one to only concede a couple of games to a visibly tense Marin Cilic. No match at all and Nole improves his immaculate record against Marin to a telling 11-0.
“Winning in straight sets helps a lot for the rest of the tournament,” commented Djokovic, “I’m going to try to win every match I play.”
Next Nole will face Wawrinka (H2H 16-3 for the Serbian), but Stan won the last one in Melbourne); Cilic will face Tomas Berdych, H2H is 5-4 for Tomas, but Cilic has won the last 2 matches in straight sets in Wimbledon and at the US Open, Berdych remains the favorite.