Frank Dancevic Into Eastbourne Semifinals; David Ferrer Gone in Holland

(Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images)

Eastbourne, Great Briton—AEGON International

Canadian glory

It certainly has been a while since a Canadian male player made the semifinals of an ATP World Tour event—July 2008 to be exact. With only one ranked player in the top 200, these sort of accomplishments are far and few between for Canadian tennis fan's Canada's lone warrior who made the semifinals in Newport last year, (yes another grass-court tournament) Frank Dancevic, is back into the final four of a tour event.

Dancevic fully engaged his primary weapon today, his serve, whipping 16 aces by his opponent Leonardo Mayer of Argentina to capture a 6-7 (7-4), 6-4, 7-5 victory.

Credit goes to Mayer in this encounter as he almost had Dancevic cooked. Although his repertoire of shots are best suited to clay-courts, the Argentine demonstrated that his game can translate well onto the lawns, and players from Argentina can play on grass as well.

Mayer had 15 aces of his own, but was never able to break the Dancevic serve. The Canadian by contrast broke serve on two occasions, both at the tail end of set two and three.

Dancevic also won a very high 85 percent of his first serve points, and only had one double fault throughout.

As mentioned in previous reviews this week, Dancevic's best surface is grass, and he has been quite unlucky in the past to not reach at least one round of 16 at the Big W.

With his current increase in form and confidence, the Canadian could be placed in the dark horse column come Wimbledon next week. If he can serve well, then he will always give himself a shot at victory.

With the win, Dancevic advances to final four of Eastbourne, for the first time where he will meet fourth seed Fabrice Santoro who advanced to the semifinals when his opponent Ivan Ljubicic was forced to retire after leading 6-3, 2-4.

In a battle of two veteran players who had split their previous eight meetings, Ljubicic started off in a flurry winning the first set on the strength of seven aces and 88 percent of his first serve points won.

But with a ill-timed injury forcing the 30-year-old Croatian to withdraw, his 37-year-old opponent was granted safe passage into the semifinals.

In one way or another you have to love Santoro for sticking around and making another final-four of a main tour event. You better believe that many players around the world would kill to be where Santoro is at the moment, with a chance to make a tour final on Friday.

Santoro and Dancevic have met twice on the ATP World Tour with the Frenchmen owning a 2-0 lead. The last time the pair met was on grass (Newport 2007) which Santoro won in three sets.

Dancevic will need to keep the points short, and avoid long rallies with Santoro. If Fabrice is given the opportunity to take the points past four strokes, he will slice Dancevic up into pieces in straights.

Elsewhere, matches that are still to come on Day Five action in Eastbourne will see: second seed Dmitry Tursunov against Denis Istomin; Janko Tipsarevic taking on Guillermo Garcia-Lopez of Spain. The winner of these two encounters will face each other in the last of the two semifinals on Friday.

's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands — Ordina Open

Spanish disaster

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