The Race for the Final Eight

By Mason Walling 

With the completion of the U.S. Open and the three other major yearly Grand Slams, all of the top players now have their eyes lock on one event:  the year-end ATP World Tour Finals in London.

Only the top eight players in the world at the end of the year are invited to play this exclusive tournament.  As we already know, from previous blogs, current world number four Andy Murray has opted to undergo back surgery which will end his 2013 season.  With what would be his spot now up for grabs, the question is who’s in and who’s out?

Misha Japaridze/AP

Frenchman Richard Gasquet helped his own cause out by defeating Mikhail Kukushkin on Sunday in Moscow, Russia, to win the ATP Kremlin Cup.  In doing so, Gasquet was able to leapfrog countryman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the ranking and slide into what would be the eighth and final position.

The celebration, however, was short-lived.  Gasquet was bounced by another Frenchman, Michael Llodra, in the first-round of the ATP Swiss Indoors in Basel, Switzerland, on Wednesday.  This will cause Gasquet to drop back out of the last spot, and Tsonga to regain it.

Just above those two in the ranking sits Stanislas Wawrinka of Switzerland.  On Tuesday, he too was upset in the first-round of his home country tournament, by Edouard Roger-Vasselin.

The recent losses of Gasquet, Wawrinka, and Tomas Berdych, only serve to benefit the unstable grasp that Roger Federer holds on his spot in the final eight.  As it currently stands, Federer is ranked number six in the world, making him number five for the World Tour Finals (with Murray’s absence) but only by a slim margin.

From the outside looking in, German Tommy Haas still has a chance to sneak his way into the Tour Finals.  Haas won the Erste Bank Open on Sunday, his second title of the year and the fifteenth of his career.  Even with the win, Haas is still three spots out of the eighth seed.  He would need to win out and get some help from players above him to qualify at the last minute.

If it were to end now, the eight players receiving bids would be Nadal, Djokovic, Ferrer, del Potro, Federer, Berdych, Wawrinka, and Tsonga.

After finishing up events in Switzerland and Spain, the men’s circuit stops in Paris for the BNP Paribas Masters before, finally, commencing at the aforementioned Tour Finals in London starting on Nov 4.