Martin Klizan caused the biggest upset of the tournament so far as he knocked out Kei Nishikori on a wet and miserable start to day 2 proceedings at Roland Garros.  After a tight first set, which Nishikori served for at 5-4, Klizan powered through the next two sets as it became very obvious that Kei was not 100% and had not fully recovered from the hip injury he picked up in Madrid.  It is such a shame and I feel immensely sad for Kei because he was so playing some terrific tennis through Barcelona and Madrid.  However his body continues to let him down.  I believe he has the potential to be the next Djokovic with his super accurate backhand and excellent returning skills.  His fitness though remains a big concern.

Huge credit must go to Klizan who played an excellent match.  The first set was a captivating watch as Klizan thwacked the ball so hard; firstly his backhand down-the-line was on fire and then he dominated the remainder of the match with his forehand.  He was ultra-aggressive, but remained very consistent.  There were a few exceptional rallies where Nishikori showed off his remarkable defence on this surface.  There was a particular point in the game at 3-3 in the first set that I’ll be searching for again on YouTube.  In the first set, there were 19 winners to 39 unforced errors between the pair.  The stats were a little misleading.

Klizan won the title in Munich a few weeks ago as a qualifier and was always going to be a very difficult match for Kei.  Perhaps, things would have turned out different if Kei had won the first set, but Klizan fully deserved the win.  My quarter-final prediction for Nishikori was way off and having heard nothing about his injury, I wrongly assumed that he was going to be OK.  Truth be told, he was always going to struggle in best of five set matches with a pretty tricky draw; an oversight on my part.  Klizan goes on to play Robin Haase in the second round and will be a huge threat in his section which features Alexandr Dolgopolov and Milos Raonic.