Wimbledon Men’s Tennis Players

In all likelihood the 2008 men’s singles event at the Wimbledon Championships is going to be the Roger Federer show. The tall, Swiss, number one matched Bjorn Borg’s back-to-back record of five Wimbledon Championship wins with his victory over Rafael Nadal at the All England Club in 2007.

He has been impressive at the Wimbledon Championships since his debut in 2001. In fact, there has only been one year in which he did not feature prominently in the London event, and that was in 2002 when he failed to reach the latter rounds in any of the four Grand Slam events.

In 2001 he reached the quarterfinals defeating seven-time champion Pete Sampras in a closely contested match in the fourth round. It is the very same Pete Sampras who Federer is currently gunning for, or rather his incredible seven-win record at Wimbledon.

It is unlikely that any of the current top ten players will be able to halt his quest for his sixth consecutive win at the All England Club, which will be an open era record – only William Renshaw in the 1800s has been able to claim the men’s singles crown in six straight years.

There have been a couple of surprises in the early rounds of the end of the year Masters Cup in Shanghai. Both Nadal and Federer fell to the lesser players of Gonzalez and Ferrer in a round robin format, proving that the giants of the game can be tamed.

What does, however, separate the men from the boys is that the top guns generally only start peaking in the important rounds of an event, and this is certainly the case with Roger Federer when he trounced world no.4 Nikolay Davydenko in straight sets in just 87 minutes to keep his Masters Cup hopes alive! He has won the event three times since 2003, only missing out to David Nalbandian in 2005.

Rafael Nadal is a brilliant tennis player. He has the might and slight of hand of a true champion, but his preferred surface is clay, and it is unlikely that this Wimbledon men’s tennis player will be able to subdue the maestro on his favoured surface, grass.

Both Ferrer and Gonzalez are also more comfortable on clay, and Davydenko has had a bad run of things with accusations of match-fixing and not trying his best. So, for whatever reason, the Russian is not firing on all cylinders at the moment.

Perhaps the only two possible contenders for the title are Novak Djokovic and David Nalbandian. Djokovic had a fantastic ending at the 2007 US Open, but his form in the latter part of the year has not been as great. He qualified for the Shanghai Masters Cup, but was one of the first casualties when he lost the first two of his matches in the round robin format, and was consequently knocked out altogether.

If anybody has a chance to rain on Federer’s parade then it has to be Argentine, David Nalbandian. He has had an awesome ending to the 2007 season. He has gotten the better of both Nadal and Federer at the Madrid and Paris Masters, and is currently looking in fantastic form.

However, when all is said and done, it is going to take something really special to stop Federer from setting yet another record at the 2008 Wimbledon Championships.