O2 good to miss!

With a little over a month to go, the wait is almost over for arguably the most illustrious tennis competition to hit London once again.

The ATP World Tour Finals, formerly named the Tennis Masters Cup, will take place on November 22nd at the London O2 arena. For those of you who don’t know how it works, the top 8 male seeds from the ATP world rankings battle it out in a round robin tournament before a victor is crowned after a final match between the top two men in each of the two round robin pools.

Swiss World No.1 Roger Federer has lifted the trophy an impressive five times already and is favourite to clinch the trophy – along with a tidy $5m prize fund – around this time next month. However, the competition is tougher than ever, with World No.2 Rafael Nadal and rising Argentine star Juan Martin Del Potro both in blistering form. Nadal has recovered from glandular fever and a back problem which saw a turbulent string of results allow Brit Andy Murray to pinch the World No.2 spot, albeit momentarily, from his grasp before the Spaniard reclaimed his seeding with impressive form as of late on the ATP tour.

Serbian World No.4 and last year’s winner Novak Djokovic is hot on Murray’s heels in the world rankings, and has already firmly booked his place in the World Tour Finals. Sixth-ranked American powerhouse Andy Roddick is some way off the pace of the formidable ‘Top 5’, yet with a string of decent results this year he too is set to book his place in the Finals. The battle for the last two places is on a knife edge, with Frenchmen Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Gilles Simon, Russian Nikolay Davydenko, Spaniard Fernando Verdasco all in the running. Davydenko, the Russian No.1, is in pole to take one of the two places on offer with a convincing victory over Nadal to claim the Shanghai Masters title this month, demonstrating that nobody can be written off for a name on the coveted trophy in the last big tournament of the season, whilst it looks likely that Tsonga will take up the last slot with the World No.7 having a comfortable points gap between himself and his competitors in the world rankings.