At least he got there!

Just a quick post to close out Toronto before Roger start his first match in Cincy.  There are two ways to look at his recent loss in the final to an inspired Jo Wilfred Tsonga.  It's easy to dwell on the negatives - that he has only won two of the seven finals that he has been in this year, that he didn't even create any break point opportunities against Jo, that he made too many errors.  And of course these things are true.  But more important than all of this is that he made it to the final in the first place.  He struggled in a couple of the matches, against Cilic and Ferrer, and as someone so aptly put it on twitter, last year he would have lost one of those matches.  

Let's quickly list the extreme positives:

• He fought through tough matches when he maybe wasn't playing his best against good opponents and got the wins
• He made it to the final when guys like Djokovic, Murray and Wawrinka lost early
• He is 33 years old, has four kids, and is still ranked #3 in the world 
• He has made it to seven final this year, including a grand slam
• He is healthy again, playing sooooo much better than last year
• He is enjoying tennis and life on the tour at an age when several of the guys his age have already hung up their raquets

I think that gives you the idea that there is so much to be happy about in spite of the disappointing loss.  I firmly believe much of that had to do with the extremely unfair scheduling with Roger only playing evening matches until the final.  Conditions are much quicker in the daytime and even though he usually does well with quick conditions, if he hasn't been playing in them at all it simply is too hard to adjust without practice.  Also, he had several late nights, which is hard to recover from.  In spite of those issues, however, it really was a very close match in terms of score; a couple points different in the second set tiebreak and he may have turned it around.  

But on to Cincy now.  We will see how he recovers from his busy week last week.  Hopefully he can put up a good showing here, but if not, all the more time to rest and then practice up for U.S. Open, where I think he has a very good chance.