Things were going OK until they had to withdraw halfway through their second-round match. Mahut is entered in Madrid with Herbert, and in Rome with Jeremy Chardy.
Juan Sebastian Cabal and Robert Farah, last week’s champs in Barcelona, are at their most dangerous on clay and will definitely be among the front runners, as will the team they beat in that final, Jamie Murray and Bruno Soares.
Some players have gotten on big streaks the past few months with perhaps the best team on the dirt this year being Horacio Zeballos and Maximo Gonzalez. During the “Golden Swing”, Gonzalez had a Bryan-brothers-like run, reaching the final at all four events—two of them with Zeballos. Gonzalez and Guillermo Duran, his partner for the week in Estoril, dropped their quarterfinal match. The only seeded team to make it to the semis there, in fact, is Marcus Daniell and Wesley Koolhof, while no seeds made it to the final four at the ATP’s other stop this week in Munich.
With new teams to be crowned this week, the notion of depth on the ATP Tour has only intensified.
THE WOMEN
On the WTA Tour this year, the clay has been kind to multiple teams. At the first stop in Charleston, the veterans Anna-Lena Groenefeld and Alicja Rosolska got their partnership off to a perfect start with the title.
Just last week in Stuttgart, Groenefeld’s countrywomen Mona Barthel and Anna-Lena Friedsam delighted the home crowd with the title. Perhaps a sign of things to come, though, was the victory by Timea Babos and Kristina Mladenovic in Istanbul. Last year’s Australian Open champs know what it takes to prepare for a major.
With the finals set in both Prague and Rabat, those duos getting that far will look to keep pushing in the weeks ahead. If they keep playing like this, Rabat finalists Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez and Sara Sorribes Tormo will be a tough out.
