Monday Hawkeye: Nadal, Haase set records

Monday Hawkeye takes a look back at the numerical and statistical week on the ATP Tour. The debut addition compares tennis players’ earnings with those of Floyd Mayweather.

1) Robin Haase lost his 16th and 17th consecutive tiebreakers at the ATP main-draw level when he fell to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga 7-6(5), 7-6(2) in the Rome second round. That is an all-time ATP Tour record. Haase is 0-7 in tiebreakers in 2013. The last tiebreaker won by the Dutchman came exactly one year ago in Rome qualifying against Sergiy Stakhovsky. Haase won that match 6-4, 7-6(9). He won his last main-draw tiebreaker 15 months ago in a 7-6(4), 3-6, 6-3 Zagreb victory over Matthias Bachinger.

2) Milos Raonic has played third-set tiebreakers in three consecutive tournaments (lost to Jarkko Nieminen in Monte-Carlo, beat Tommy Robredo in Barcelona, lost to Fernando Verdasco in Madrid). With his setback against Verdasco, Raonic now 9-5 lifetime in deciding third-set tiebreakers. Verdasco is still just 6-14. Between them they are 1-1 in deciding 3STBs (Raonic won 6-4, 3-6, 7-6(5) at the 2011 Memphis event just a few days after beating Verdasco 7-6(6), 7-6(5) in the San Jose final).

3) In Andy Murray’s 7-6(11), 7-6(3) win over Florian Mayer in the Madrid second round, the 24-point tiebreaker in the first set was his longest since Monte-Carlo in 2009, when he won the first set against Fabio Fognini by the exact same score. This was the fourth 7-6, 7-6 win of Murray’s career after previous defeats of Taylor Dent (2005 Cincinnati), Robin Soderling (2005 Bangkok), and Novak Djokovic (2008 Cincinnati).

4) With his defeat of Mayer, Murray recorded his 400th career ATP match win. He is the third British man to reach the 400-mark. Tim Henman earned 496 career victories while Greg Rusedski won 436 matches.

5) The tiebreaker played by Murray and Gilles Simon in Murray’s 2-6, 6-4, 7-6(6) win over Gilles Simon in the third round was just the second tiebreaker in 30 sets between the two men. Murray also won the other one in Madrid during a 6-4, 7-6(6) victory in the 2008 final (on an indoor hard court). Murray has won 11 matches in a row against Simon to improve to 11-1 lifetime against the Frenchman in their head-to-head series.

6) Grigor Dimitrov was 16-0 this year when he wins the first set of match before his Madrid loss to Stanislas Wawrinka. He extended that mark last week in Madrid victories over Djokovic and Javier Marti followed by a Sunday win in Rome over Marcos Baghdatis. Dimitrov is 22-0 in his last 22 matches when he wins the first set dating back to last season (20-0 in 20 main-draw matches). His last loss from a set up prior to Madrid came to Richard Gasquet in the 2012 Bangkok second round.

7) Rafael Nadal’s triumph in Madrid gave him his 40th career ATP clay-court title. That leaves him in a tie for second with Tomas Muster, trailing only Guillermo Vilas (46). It was also Nadal’s 23rd career Masters Series title, giving him the record alone ahead of Ivan Lendl (Lendl had 22 if you include similar-sized titles before the Masters Series was created).

8) Despite missing the Australian summer and coming off a seven-month hiatus from tennis, Nadal has won five ATP titles in a season for the first time since 2010…. And it’s only May. This is the seventh time in his career Nadal has won at least five titles in a year. His career-high is 11 in 2005.

9) Wawrinka, who finished runner-up to Nadal in Madrid, has four wins over Top 10 players in his last three tournaments (Murray in Monte-Carlo, David Ferrer in Oeiras, Tsonga and Tomas Berdych in Madrid). Wawrinka has never had more than four Top 10 victories in an entire season.

10) Pablo Andujar became the second unseeded semifinalist at a Masters event this year (Fabio Fognini in Monte-Carlo). Andujar also became the first wild card and the first player outside the Top 100 (he was No. 113) to reach the semis of a Masters event since Michael Llodra last fall in Paris.