Progress for Pospisil, but another level awaits
Such is the separation of the top four or five players in the world now — if you include Stan Wawrinka — that Vasek Pospisil essentially played his best tennis in his first major quarter-final on Wednesday and couldn’t get a set from Andy Murray.
While he served rockets and had many games when he wasn’t in the least bit of trouble, Pospisil simply couldn’t find a way to get a service break and lost in straight sets, as Murray turned it up when he needed to.
You can talk about the boneheaded intervention of the chair umpire Pascal Maria at inopportune times all you like — and it was pretty alarming — but those sorts of things happen all the time in tennis.
And even if the timing of his charging the 25-year-old Vernon native with a couple of time interventions seemed unfair, and it was, there was no way he was winning this one. He was too fatigued and he simply isn’t at this upper-echelon level yet.
Milos Raonic has been trying to crack through this ceiling for two years now. It’s not easy. It’s taken Wawrinka an entire career.
But that doesn’t mean Pospisil didn’t make some progress. For starters, just being able to play as much as he did as well as he did is a huge step forward; the various nagging ailments he’s had most of this season and in seasons past didn’t come into play.
The solid performances in highpressure situations are going to give him a huge mental lift, and the points he’s earned have eased the pressure that was building prior to this tournament — worries that he might fall a long way in the rankings when his Washington points come off from last year.
Further, he began exploring new and different ways, whereby with some improvement in his game, he might find opportunities to make inroads against the top players. There was a time on Murray’s serve where he was effectively using his forehand to get the ball wider on the Scot’s forehand, thereby opening up the court for his deft touch on the volley upon approaching the net. He managed quite a few openings, but none came to fruition.
He began exploring ways to change the pattern of his game so as to try new things. His low backhand slices were generating a few more points with Murray having to stretch forward. He actually had as much pressure as he’s ever had on Murray in their previous matches, yet the bottom line of 6-4, 7-5, 6-4 with no service breaks shows there’s lots of work still ahead despite this excellent showing.
Immediately now there’s Davis Cup, and other than providing him with a little downtime in the preparation week, it’s pretty much a writeoff. In fact, it’s looming as a total pain in the butt.
With Raonic out, there is very little chance to win the tie particularly given it’s outdoors on clay. If they are to have any hope it will mean he’ll have to play all three best-offive matches in three days, and after this unexpected success on grass and the hard-court season looming, the last thing he wants to do is go back onto clay.
Davis Cup has been good to him and he’s been good for it in the past, but the Raonic development has made it nothing more than a risk that another cluster workload could bring back his old health issues.
So ominous is this commitment, Pospisil began talking a new medical issue, something about needing an MRI on his hand for something minor that has been bothering him, something nobody had heard about until today.
But whatever nagging injury he may be suffering from, he should keep it nagging as long as possible the way he played. It’s been a long, long while since he’s served as consistently as he did in the last six singles sets he played in this tournament, and the rest of his arsenal looked as good as it ever has in the past as well. It’s just that the opponent is on a different level right now, a level Pospisil has the potential to reach, but not for another couple of years at least.
“I played a lot of tennis and how much that affected the match is hard to say,” Pospisil told the postmatch news conference.
“But I definitely started to feel a little heavy in the legs in that third set. Obviously I would like to have been more fresh, but it’s still been a great week, just the beginning.”
Whether it’s the beginning or just a pleasant, once-in-a-lifetime run due to a favourable draw is pretty much up to him right now.