World No. 1 Nadal beaten by Melzer in Shanghai | Tennis Updates

Rafael Nadal failed to reach a quarterfinal for the first time this year after a shock defeat by Jurgen Melzer in the third round of the Shanghai Masters on Thursday.

World No. 1 Nadal beaten by Melzer

The No. 1-ranked Nadal had never dropped a set to the Austrian in three previous meetings but went down 6-1, 3-6, 6-3. The Spaniard had most recently beaten Melzer in the semifinals of the French Open this year on his way to the title.

Nadal won the U.S. Open in September to become the seventh man in history to win all four Grand Slam tournaments and was bidding for his eighth title of the season in Shanghai.

He won the Japan Open title on Sunday before traveling to Shanghai and said his busy schedulecontributed to the loss.

“This isn’t a surprise for me. I didn’t play well, “said Nadal. “I felt slow on court and I made more mistakes than usual. In general, I am a little bit more tired than usual, physically and mentally.

“You can’t expect to win every week. All the good work is done for me for the year.”

Melzer played aggressively from the start, hitting booming forehand winners and attacking Nadal’s secondserve to break the Spaniard twice and capture the opening set in 40 minutes.

“I felt he was uncomfortable after a few games,” Melzer said. “When the ball was in play, he sometimes missed and his backhand was just dying in the net. I felt if I kept playing like that and not give him too much rhythm, I’d have my chance.”

Nadal stormed back in the second set, getting his first—and only—break of the match with a running backhand down the line that the Austrian dumped into the net.

The two players held serve in the deciding set until the fifth game when Nadal badly shanked a forehand long and hit another one wide to give Melzer his third break of the match. The Spaniard saved three match points on his serve, but Melzer easily put the match away on his next serve.

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Rafael Nadal & Roger Federer set for ATP London final

Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer will meet in a potential blockbuster of a final between the world's two best players at the ATP World Tour Finals on Sunday.

Spaniard Nadal will attempt to win the year-end crown for the first time while Switzerland's Federer will be going for his fifth title when the pair meet at 1730 GMT.

It will be the 22nd meeting between two players already well established among the greatest the sport has ever produced, and their first in London since Nadal's epic Wimbledon victory in 2008.

"It's the same city, a few miles away," Federer said. "But honestly, I don't even think about that for one second preparing for Sunday's match. It's more of a broad approach thinking back over what has happened the last few months in my game."

606: DEBATE I'm a fed fan but I don't think he can do it. I see a lot of unforced errors from the great man Castor_Troy

Nadal and Federer's dominance is such that they have shared an incredible 21 of the last 23 Grand Slam titles, with the 29-year-old Swiss having won a record 16 major titles and the Spaniard, five years his junior, closing fast on nine.

Nadal has enjoyed an incredible year in which he picked up the French Open, Wimbledon and US Open titles, with the victory in New York completing his Grand Slam set, and another win on Sunday would bring him the last remaining significant title missing from his CV.

Federer has had a relatively ordinary season by his own extremely lofty standards but won the Australian Open in January and remains second in the world rankings.

And both men have been in tremendous form in London, Federer making the final without dropping a set and Nadal going unbeaten through the group stages after failing to win a single set on his O2 debut in 2009.

Playing indoors has always proved the biggest challenge for Nadal and, although he holds a commanding 14-7 lead against Federer overall, the Swiss has won both their previous matches under cover.

"The surface is not too slow, it's not too quick," Nadal added. "But here, when you play against the best players in the world, they are more specialists than me in these kinds of surfaces.

"I said before the tournament that here you don't have a big chance to defend if you are not playing very well, by playing higher balls to try and find a solution. The only way here is to play aggressive. You can play defensive for moments but you have to come back to the attack."

Murray falls to Nadal in final set tie-break

Nadal certainly proved he has made the necessary adjustments in his three-hour win over Murray on Saturday, and the Spaniard admitted that he was feeling the affects of that effort.

"I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow, how I'm going to feel," Nadal stated. "You can imagine, right now I am very tired. That's the truth."

Federer might have a losing record against Nadal but he expects to be as excited as the 17,500 spectators inside the O2 Arena for Sunday's final.

"I'm really looking forward to playing against Rafa," Federer said. "Who wouldn't? I'm no different.

"What he's achieved is amazing at his age, to win the career Grand Slam, and he already has three in a row again on another great streak. He's obviously a wonderful player, he's proven himself he can play on any surface. The ones who still call him a clay-court expert, they still don't know much about tennis."

The pair have met just once this year, with Nadal winning on clay in Madrid, and Federer knows he must take advantage of the indoor conditions on Sunday.

"We haven't played in a long time," Federer continued. "I'll try to take it to him, play aggressive, attack his second serve, see how it goes."

And when asked whether he expected Nadal to suffer physically after his lengthy semi-final, Federer responded: "I don't think it's going to have much effect on him, to be honest. He's been done a few hours now, he might be tucked up in bed already while I'm still doing my press conference here.

"That's his advantage, that he played early."

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Dominant Federer defeats Roddick

Roger Federer swept aside Andy Roddick to reach the final of the Swiss Indoors in Basle.

The top seed broke the American four times on his way to a 6-2 6-4 win in one hour 10 minutes.

Roddick had five break opportunities himself, but could only convert one against the 16-time Grand Slam winner.

Instead the Swiss dominated on serve, winning 94% of points on his first serve compared to his opponent’s 71%.

Federer will go head to head with defending champion Novak Djokovic for the title – in a re-run of the 2009 final – after the second-seeded Serbian saw off fellow countryman Viktor Troicki 7-6 (7/4) 6-4 in one hour 37 minutes.

Both players broke once each in the opening set before a single break helped Djokovic close out the second.

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Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal into final of ATP finals

LONDON (AP)—Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray relentlessly ran each other all over the court for more than three hours in a match that flip-flopped throughout.

Nadal finally got the breaks he needed Saturday to win 7-6 (5), 3-6, 7-6 (6). The top-ranked Spaniard had to overcome a mid-match slump to reach his first final at the ATP World Tour Finals, where he will face 16-time major champion Roger Federer.

“(It) was (an) incredible tennis match,” said Nadal, who won this year’s U.S. Open to complete a career Grand Slam. “(This) was a really difficult match against one of the best players of the world.”The reigning French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open champion has never before played in the final of the season-ending event for the top eight players. And to win his first title, he’ll have to play four-time champion Federer Sunday at the O2 Arena.

Federer beat Novak Djokovic 6-1, 6-4 in the other semifinal.

“Obviously I’m really looking forward to playing against Rafa tomorrow,” Federer said. “Who wouldn’t?”

In the early match, both Nadal and Murray looked strong throughout the first set, which the Spaniard won in a tiebreaker despite a late surge from Murray. But Nadal started to falter after holding serve to lead 3-2 in the second. Murray won 17 of the next 23 points—and four straight games—to take the set and even the score.

“I was a little bit tired in the second,” Nadal said. “And when he break me, I said, ‘Well, going to be very difficult to come back to this set.”’

Nadal never fully regained his form after the mid-match slump, but he was able to break Murray to take a 2-1 lead in the third set. The Spaniard then had his first match point on Murray’s serve while leading 5-3, but the fifth-ranked Briton managed to hold the game, break back to 5-5 and force the final tiebreaker.

“I probably played one bad game the whole match, or maybe just a couple of bad points,” Murray said. “But, yeah, it was great tennis. I think both of us played well pretty much from the beginning of the match.”

In the tiebreaker, Murray won the first three points—two of them on Nadal’s serve—and looked as though he was going to roll to victory. But Nadal clawed back to 4-4 before getting another match point at 6-5.

“Even when I was losing 4-1, 3-0 in the final tiebreak, I was happy,” Nadal said. “I was saying, ‘Just try to be there,’ because always (there is) still a chance for me.”

Murray again saved that one, but he couldn’t do anything about the final match point, which Nadal won with an inside-out forehand.

Federer looked as dominating as ever against Djokovic, stretching his career record against the Serb to 13-6.

The second-ranked Swiss jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the first set, then broke Djokovic again to make it 5-1. But Djokovic responded early in the second set, breaking Federer to give himself a 3-0 lead.

That didn’t last long, however, as Federer held serve, broke back and then held again to 3-3.

Federer’s run lasted another three points, but he wasted all three break points in the seventh game, allowing Djokovic to take a 4-3 lead on serve.

After holding, Federer broke again and then served out the match.

“He was on top of his game,” said Djokovic, who beat Federer in the U.S. Open semifinals. “He was playing unbelievable from the first moment. He deserved to win.”

Murray finished his match with 22 aces, but he also had 47 unforced errors to go along with his 53 winners. Overall, the Briton won 114 points in the match, five more than Nadal.

“It was one of those matches where you kind of knew—so many long rallies, so many good points—I kind of knew when I was out there that it was a great match,” Murray said. “It’s nice in some ways to be involved in matches like that. But it’s not nice losing them

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Americans avoid disaster, must regroup

BRIDGEVIEW, Ill. – Smiles all around, cheering fans, a place in next summer’s Women’s World Cup secured – for a few brief moments, all seemed well with the U.S. women’s national team. Until coach Pia Sundhage spoke.

“That was crap,” she said.

Sundhage’s frank and blunt assessment was in reference to the first 20 minutes of an unconvincing 1-0 victory over Italy at Toyota Park, in what was the second and final leg of a World Cup play-in series. It was an identical scoreline to the one in Italy a week earlier. The Americans, ranked No. 1 in the world, clinched their spot in the tournament, but they raised plenty of questions along the way.After a fraught month that saw the U.S. side upset by Mexico in CONCACAF regional qualifying, thrusting them into this do-or-die encounter with the Italians, what the U.S. team needs more than anything right now is time to regroup.

Fortunately it will get some, with the domestic WPS league having entered its offseason and the World Cup in Germany still seven months away. Even so, it appears likely that the team, which has won two World Cups and the last two Olympic gold medals, will approach the event with an aura of dominance that is greatly reduced.

Amy Rodriguez’s first-half goal was the difference on Saturday, but a mixed performance was far from being enough to convince the skeptics that all is well in Sundhage’s camp.

“When you have a highly ranked team that gets beaten like we did against Mexico, then it gives other teams confidence,” striker Abby Wambach said. “But you can’t stay undefeated forever, that never happens in sports. The pressure of maintaining that can be difficult. You don’t want to be going into a tournament scared and worried about the outcome.”

Both teams missed a series of scoring opportunities in frosty conditions, with the Italians spurning some glorious early chances that could have piled on even more pressure, and the Americans returning the favor in the second half.

What most concerned Sundhage was a number of uncharacteristic, basic errors that prevented the U.S. from taking a stranglehold on the game.

“This team can win the World Cup,” Sundhage said. “But I hope they know they will have to play a lot better to do it. If they don’t know it, I will tell them, because it was not good.”

The USA has a proud tradition in the women’s game, dating back to stars such as Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain and the heroes of the victorious 1999 team that won the World Cup on home soil.

Recent times have seen a drastic improvement in the depth of their opposition, though, with a cluster of European, African and South American sides making great strides – so much so that Germany and Brazil will go into next summer as favorites, with the Americans just behind.

A routine waltz into the later rounds is no longer guaranteed, as highlighted by the recent loss to No. 22 Mexico, which only a few years ago was considered a pushover.

“This will be the most competitive World Cup ever,” said Sundhage. “Six or seven teams can win it. That is unique.”

With every passing game, it is increasingly clear that the USA can no longer rely on its athletic ability and indomitable will to win. Sundhage believes an increase in “sophistication” is a vital next step.

Wambach still feels that the tried and trusted methods will be good enough in Germany, once the squad has had the chance to iron the aches and pains of a long season out of their joints.

“We can improve in a lot of different areas,” Wambach said. “But more than anything, this team is just super fatigued right now. We have been going for 11 straight months and it is not easy.

“When we get a bit of rest we can come back to the drawing board

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