He may not be everybody’s cup of tea (he certainly isn’t mine) but Aussie brat Bernard Tomic achieved a significant milestone this week by cracking the top 50 for the first time.
When Tomic reached the Wimbledon quarter-final in July, he became the youngest player to do so since Boris Becker back in 1986.
By reaching the top 50 before his 19th birthday he joins a group that includes Rafael Nadal, Richard Gasquet, Tomas Berdych, Andy Murray and Juan Martin Del Potro in recent years so once again he’s in good company.
This landmark is also good excuse to share this excellent article on the player written during Wimbledon.
Although four years older than Tomic, Alex Dolgopolov is another youngster on the rise and the Ukrainian moved up one place to a new high of 18, despite a horrible defeat to Flavio Cipolla in Beijing.
Speaking of which, that win helped the Italian soft-baller rise 12 places to a new personal best of 83.
Flavio Cipolla
Other players to achieve significant ranking breakthroughs this week were Kevin Anderson, who enters the top 30 for the first time, Robin Haase, a debutant in the top 40 and Ivan Dodig who rose three places to reach the magical seeding spot of 32.
While all a long, long way off their career high marks, it was a good week on tour for some of the veterans further down the rankings.
David Nalbandian (+7 to 57), Ivo Karlovic (+15 to 61), Julien Benneteau (+9 to 64), James Blake (+7 to 68) and Juan Carlos Ferrero (+15 to 69) all made significant jumps towards rankings more befitting their abilities.
Outside the top 100, two players at the other end of their careers both climbed to new highs with 21-year-old German Cedric-Marcel Stebe and 20-year-old Spaniard Pablo Carreno-Busta moving up three places to 102 and 137 respectively.
Coming one place behind Carreno-Busta at 138 is one of the year’s hidden success stories, Tunisian Malek Jaziri, who started the year ranked 333 and one year ago was at a lowly 418.
His progress has been pretty spectacular and with little to defend for the rest of the year a top 100 finish is a real possibility.
