NEW YORK (AP)—If Roger Federer is going to reach a seventh consecutive U.S. Open final, he might need to get past the man who ended his Grand Slam semifinal streak.

Five-time U.S. Open champion Federer was given a possible quarterfinal against two-time French Open runner-up Robin Soderling when the draw for this year’s U.S. Open was made Thursday.

The No. 5-seeded Soderling upset Federer in the quarterfinals in Paris this year, stopping Federer’s record run of reaching at least the semifinals at 23 consecutive Grand Slam tournaments.
 
The other men’s matchups in the quarterfinals could be No. 1-seeded Rafael Nadal against No. 8 Fernando Verdasco, two-time major finalist Andy Murray against Wimbledon runner-up Tomas Berdych, and No. 3 Novak Djokovic against No. 6 Nikolay Davydenko or No. 9 Andy Roddick.

The top-seeded woman, 2009 runner-up Caroline Wozniacki, could face 2006 champion Maria Sharapova in the fourth round and 2004 champion Svetlana Kuznetsova in the quarterfinals.

Other possible women’s quarterfinals set up Thursday are defending champion Kim Clijsters against French Open runner-up Sam Stosur, 2000-01 U.S. Open winner Venus Williams against French Open champion Francesca Schiavone, and 2008 U.S. Open finalist Jelena Jankovic against Wimbledon runner-up Vera Zvonareva.

Murray, hoping to become the first British man since 1936 to win a Grand Slam title, could meet No. 20-seeded Sam Querrey of the United States in the fourth round. Another American, Wimbledon marathon man John Isner, is seeded 18th and also is in that quarter of the draw.

In the semifinals, Murray was drawn to meet Nadal, who lost in the last four in New York each of the past two years and is trying to complete a career Grand Slam by winning the U.S. Open for the first time.

Federer was drawn to meet Djokovic or Roddick in the semifinals. Aside from his potential rematch with Soderling, Federer could face another familiar opponent in the third round: 2001 U.S. Open and 2002 Wimbledon champion Lleyton Hewitt. Federer beat Hewitt in the 2004 U.S. Open final, part of a 15-match, head-to-head winning streak for Federer—which ended when Hewitt beat him in the final of a grass-court tournament at Halle, Germany, in June.

Federer lost in the 2009 U.S. Open final to Juan Martin del Potro, who—like No. 1-ranked Serena Williams—previously withdrew from this year’s tournament, having not recovered fully from surgery.

Williams’ older sister, Venus, who is seeded No. 3, could face an intriguing matchup in the third round against No. 32-seeded Tsvetana Pironkova of Bulgaria. Pironkova has won two of her previous three matches against Venus Williams, including a straight-sets upset in the Wimbledon quarterfinals on June 29.

That was the last match Williams played on tour; she sprained her left kneecap in early August, forcing her to withdraw from hard-court tournaments in Cincinnati and Montreal.

The U.S. Open begins Monday, and Williams will have gone more than two months without a match by the time she meets her first-round opponent, Roberta Vinci of Italy, who is 1-7 for her career at Flushing Meadows.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP)—U.S. Open top seed Caroline Wozniacki got a little help from the entire Yale football team Wednesday as she cruised to a 6-4, 6-1 win over Dominika Cibulkova at the Pilot Pen tournament.

Wozniacki, who won in Montreal on Monday and is this tournament’s two-time defending champion, has a special relationship with the team. She took time last year to visit a Yale practice and talked to the players about mental toughness. They responded this year by appearing en masse, in their jerseys at her opening match.

“They are really nice guys, and that they all came and supported me today was just fun,” she said. “We should make this a tradition.”
 
Wozniacki got off to a rough start, and was down 4-3 in the first set. In between games, she got some treatment for a stiff back and responded by giving up just two points the rest of the set.

“I was telling myself, ‘I want to play, move your feet, come on let’s go,”’ Wozniacki said. “We don’t want to play three sets of course, I want to win in two.”

It didn’t hurt, she said, to have about 80 good looking guys yelling for her.

“We’ve kind of adopted her as our professional women’s tennis player, and hopefully we’re her American college football team,” Yale coach Tom Williams said.

Wozniacki plays Italian Flavia Pennetta in the quarterfinals. Pennetta advanced with a 6-3, 6-2 win over Olga Govortsova of Bellarus. If Wozniacki wins Thursday, she will clinch the U.S. Open Series championship.

In other matches, Russian Elena Dementieva moved into the quarterfinals with a 7-6 (4), 6-7 (5), 6-4 win over Kateryna Bondarenko of Ukraine.

Dementieva, who is ranked No. 13 in the world, has dropped out of the top 10 for the first time since 2008. She said she spent four weeks in bed after tearing her left calf muscle in June during the French Open, and it has taken her some time to feel comfortable on the U.S. hard courts.

“I expected to play summer matches to get my confidence back, and just to feel the surface” she said. “Unfortunately, I was not able to do so.”

She had plenty of time on the surface Wednesday, playing for just over three hours in a back-and-forth contest that featured 13 service breaks.

She will face Marion Bartoli next. Bartoli beat Anastasia Rodionova 6-3, 6-1 on Wednesday.

Nadia Petrova, playing her second straight match on the grandstand court, beat Bethanie Mattek-Sands in straight sets, 6-3, 6-3. She will face Australian Samantha Stosur in the quarterfinals.

“I’m getting to that stage when I get really confident and feeling ready for the Open,” Petrova said.

Russian Dinara Safina needed two tiebreakers to get by Daniela Hantuchova 7-6 (4), 7-6 (2).

Safina was happy with her serving, which she said has been slow to come back since she ruptured a muscle and suffered a stress fracture in her back in January. She won 73 percent of her first-serve points, and 81 percent in the second set.

“Before it was one of my weapons, but because of my injury I was suffering a little bit,” she said. “Slowly I’m getting my motion back and am starting to use it much more.”

In the men’s draw, top seed Marcos Baghdatis needed three sets to beat Juan Ignacio Chela and earn a quarterfinal berth.

Chela took the first set 6-1, before Baghdatis came back to win the next two 6-3, 6-2.

Baghdatis said he didn’t get much sleep Tuesday night and had a bad morning, getting up earlier than he needed to, because he thought he had an earlier match.

“I was a bit tired, so I started the match like I started my day, basically,” he said. “But then, I found a solution to win. I fought the match. I stopped crying.”

James Blake, who grew up in nearby Fairfield, lost his second-round match in straight sets to Russian Alexandr Dolgopolov 6-4, 6-2.

Blake had won the first game on Tuesday night, before rain forced play to be suspended. When the players got back on the court Wednesday afternoon, Dolgopolov won the first five games, and was never really threatened.

Blake, now 30, has dropped to 111 in the world rankings, but said he still feels he has some good tennis left in him.

“I’ve gotten almost everything in my life through working as hard as I can and putting my head down and hoping for the best, and that’s what I’ve got to do now,” he said. “It’s tougher and tougher as the results aren’t coming.”

The U.S. Open draws were announced on Thursday. Here are our first impressions of the men’s bracket.

Men: Rafael Nadal gets as favorable a quarter as he’ll ever see at an Open. He gets three seeded Spaniards (David Ferrer, Feliciano Lopez and Fernando Verdasco) on his side, each of whom aren’t built for the hard courts of New York. David Nalbandian, who started the month at No. 117 but is now No. 31 seed at the Open, lurks on the bottom half of the quadrant and could provide an interesting quarterfinal test for Rafa.

On the other half of Nadal’s side, Andy Murray must be breathing a huge sigh of relief that he doesn’t see Mardy Fish anywhere near him on the bracket. (Fish has defeated Murray three times this year on hard courts.) Not that paths to the semis are ever clear in a Grand Slam, but Murray doesn’t have too many potential roadblocks in his way.

The same can’t be said on the other half of the draw for No. 6 seed Nikolay Davydenko. The Russian could potentially face Richard Gasquet in the second-round and a recharged Andy Roddick in the fourth. If Marcos Baghdatis can still stand after playing 19 matches in the last 30 days, he could see Mardy Fish in a marquee third round tilt. Novak Djokovic rounds out the quarter.

Roger Federer‘s rout to the semifinals could go through Lleyton Hewitt (third round), Jurgen Melzer (fourth round) and Robin Soderling (quarterfinal). It would be the first Grand Slam semifinal for Federer since the Australian Open.

Best first-round match: Tomas Berdych (7) v. Michael Llodra

Best potential second-round match: Nikolay Davydenko (6) v. Richard Gasquet

Most likely to be upset: Berdych

Best potential quarterfinal: Roger Federer (2) v. Robin Soderling (5)

Semifinal predictions: Rafael Nadal v. Andy Murray; Andy Roddick v. Roger Federer

Finals prediction: Federer over Murray

by Pete Bodo

NEW YORK—Well, it’s another rainy day in Flushing Meadows, but I sucked it up and made it here. So did our TENNIS magazine intern, Brad Kallet, who had to catch the proverbial trains, planes and automobiles to get here from his home home in New Jersey—all in the pouring rain, with little hope of seeing a single tennis ball hit in anger. Gotta hand it to the kid, he sure is persistent. And we actually found him a piece to write, which will appear either here or on the home page later. He’s going to check out the umpires and ballboys, all of whom are captives on site all day (unlike fans and players) and work something up on them.

One perk of tenure as a tennis journalist is that it earns you an exemption from having to write rainy-day ballboy or umpire pieces. That also leaves me high and dry, figuratively speaking, because another unspoken axiom of the trade is that you only get one rainy day story out of a particularly bad spell of weather, unless of course the tournament is in full swing and you can hunt down some coaches or players, or analyze the draw. This tournament is not only not in full swing, the draw won’t be made until Thursday, and the qualifying has barely started.

I had hoped to get together with Robert Kendrick today, but he stayed in the city. It won’t be a total write-off of a day for me, though, because I have a call booked later this afternoon with Larry Ellison, the hugely successful Internet entrepreneur and new owner of the Indian Wells tournament. I’ll have to return to the city to get that one done.

But let’s take a quick look at some recent news, just to keep our spirits up.

—Yesterday, James Blake was involved in the shortest match played on the tour so far this year—a 35-minute, 6-0, 6-1 affair. The good news for Blake is that he was on the winning end for a change. I just went to the ATP website and am delighted—and amazed—to see that play apparently is in progress in New Haven, despite the horrible weather here in New York. 

Today, Blake is meeting Alexandr Dolgopolov, about whom I’ve been hearing good things. We’ll keep our eyes on him in the coming days. I hope the quick-time win has boosted Blake’s confidence.

—Elena Dementieva presently is fighting cheek to jowl with Kateryna Bondarenko, 3-all in the third. Which begs the question, just how fit and match-ready will Dementieva be for the U.S. Open, where she’s often played so well in the past?

It’s funny, but when I think of Dementieva, the thing that comes to mind is all those tournaments, a dozen or so, where she played like a house on fire and looked like a can’t miss winner or finalist. . . yet always missed. Choking, injuries, inexplicably bad days (for someone who had been playing so well, and had learned the value of seizing opportunity) are the personal history she’s written at the majors.

Frankly, I’m shocked she hasn’t won one, and I’m rapidly losing the once airtight conviction that she would bag a major one day. For her sake, I’m glad she won that Olympic Games gold medal. Given the typical Russian’s reverence for Olympic athletes and events, I imagine that Dementieva sticks that gold medal under the sheets when she goes to sleep, to keep her warm and optimistic.

—Is Marcos Baghdatis resurgent (again) for real? It’s an interesting, open question, because Baghdatis has been showing signs of the one quality that regular Grand Slam contenders demonstrate. He’s been playing consistently. The headline at the ATP website blares, “Baghdatis Continues March to US Open,” which is a nice bit of hyperbolic writing, if nothing else.

Baggy has put up three wins over Top 10 players in the past month, and improved his record on the summer hard-court circuit to 10-4. Often, a talented free spirit like Baghdatis will play well for a tournament or two, then fade. But Baghdatis, who beat Tomas Berdych and Rafael Nadal en route to a semifinal loss to champion Roger Federer at the Western and Southern Financial Group Masters, continues to play like he means it. He’s the top seed at the Pilot Pen Classic in New Haven this week, and while the conditions there have been tough, he’s declared his intentions: “It’s been a good summer for me, but I came to play here and I came to win the tournament,” he said, after knocking out Igor Andreev yesterday.

Oddly, this resurrection coincides with that of another player who has a game and form chart similar to that of Baghdatis: David Nalbandian. Both of them could be impact players at the Open. Just for the hail of it, I took a look at their head-to-head record, and it confirms the parallels. Baghdatis holds a narrow 3-2 edge, and won the last three matches running, until Nalbandian put up his second win over Baggy a few weeks ago at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic (Washington D.C.). Three of their five meetings have occurred at majors (2-1 for Baghdatis), and the Cypriot beat the Argentinian in the most critical meeting of them all—the Australian Open semifinals, 2006, thereby earning the privilege of getting spanked in the final by Roger Federer.

But mark your calendars, everyone. A U.S. Open meeting of these two talented shotmakers looms as must-see tennis.

—I don’t know who’s going to be in a tougher position, mentally and emotionally, when the U.S. Open gets underway: Melanie Oudin or Caroline Wozniacki. After Serena Williams, they were the top WTA newsmakers at the American championships last year—Oudin for that courageous, mesmerizing run to the quarters; Wozniacki for reaching the final. Oudin bowled over three high-quality Russians during her spree at Flushing Meadows: Dementieva, Maria Sharapova, and Nadia Petrova, before she was halted by Wozniacki.

This year, Oudin has won exactly one match at a major (a win over Anna Lena Gronefeld at Wimbledon), and I was somewhat surprised to see that she’s ranked no. 44—I expected it to be lower. Wozniacki is 10-3 in the majors (she reached at least the round of 16 at each Grand Slam event), but as a defending finalist, a lot will be expected of her—and her losses at the majors have been alarming, one-sided blowouts (Petra Kvitova bombarded her, 6-2, 6-0 in their fourth-round match at Wimbledon).

BTW, Oudin, Wozniacki, John Isner and Sam Querrey are part of a promotional package conceived by U.S. Open sponsor American Express. They’ve created a cheerfully optimistic space for the quartet, billing them as “Next Contenders.” Amex is planning to seed this dedicated website with exclusive material about and by those four players all the way until the end of the U.S. Open. So if you’re a fan one any of them, check it out.  And while we still don’t know Isner’s U.S. Open status (ankle), I have some exclusive material about John that I also plan to post in the coming days.

Wozniacki’s big win in Montreal the other day is sure to help her confidence, but I still think both she and Oudin have their work cut out for them if they hope to match their results of last year.