Is Nadal a deserving No.1?
Robin Soderling yet again failed to win a French Open after making consecutive finals in 2009 and 2010 but Soderling yet again played the spoilsport cum saviour for the second consecutive year.
In 2009 Soderling played spoil sport to Nadal by terminating his run of 31 consecutive victories at French Open. Soderling's win over Nadal and his subsequent loss to Federer in the finals paved the way for Federer to complete a rare career Grand Slam in Mens Singles. Soderling replicated the feat yet again this year breaking Federer's incredible run of 23 consecutive Grand Slams and his subsequent loss to Nadal in the final enabled the latter to take the World Number One Ranking as a bonus.
While Rafael Nadal needs to be complimented for making a comeback by winning the French Open, the big question mark is does Nadal deserve the number one ranking? The bitter truth is Nadal got the ranking only on the strength of his performance in a single Grand Slam coupled with an unexpected Federer failure in a solitary Slam.
What is worse for Federer is that even if Federer wins Wimbledon he will get zero points whereas Nadal stands to gain points even if he loses in the second round and the reason for that is Federer is defending 2000 points he got for his Wimbledon victory while Nadal is defending zero. It may be argued that Nadal did miss Wimbledon last year but had he participated and lost in first round he would still have been the beneficiary as he would have been defending zero points.
The scenario for Federer looks blank for the rest of year as well as he would be defending a huge number of points gained for his outstanding performance while Nadal stands to gain a lot of points even for average performances as he is hardly defending any points. The flaw in the ranking system works more in favour of a poor performance by a player in the preceeding year giving a decent performance in the next year, than a player giving consistent performances over a longer period of time. Starting from Wimbledon 2004 till Australian Open 2010 Federer has made the semi finals or more on 23 consecutive occasions making a incredible 20 finals of which he won 14 and during the same period Nadal made a mere 12 semis winning 7 of them. If one were to go by Federer's record of making semis for 6 conseuctive years Nadal should never have been number one leave alone reclaiming it.
The ATP would be well advised to correct the ranking system in which consistency in general and Grand Slams in particular is taken into consideration while ranking players.
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