It went down to the wire between the Kites and Hawks, making this matchup between Casper Ruud and Grigor Dimitrov very important.
Dimitrov had a pretty spectacular 2023 campaign, but he’s not been playing that well in Abu Dhabi, certainly not as well as Casper Ruud who is looking much better this year compared to last year.
Having a proper off-season certainly contributed to that as Ruud promised to never repeat what he did last year – skipping the offseason.
Both players needed to win this match because the score between the teams was pretty close before the match. The format makes it so that the team with the most points after five matches wins the tie.
The points are basically just games won, so keeping it close is paramount unless you want your team to have to catch up to a dramatic deficit.
These two kept it pretty close for the majority of the match. We didn’t see any breaks in the first few games, though Ruud had a pretty big hold early, saving several break points.
Despite some minor chances on both sides, neither player was really able to find a breakthrough. Both served pretty well and dominated on their serve, especially Dimitrov, who was basically untouchable on his serve.
Despite that, Dimitrov found himself in a strange situation at 4-5 because he was down 15-40 on his serve. Match points for Ruud came out of nowhere, as he didn’t have a single break point up until that point, but that’s tennis.
The Norwegian would end up using the first one to win the match 6-4, which was a huge win for his team as the Hawks won the matchup 20-19.
The Kites had the lead before this match, but Ruud proved to be the hero for his team once more. Unfortunately, that’s it from the team as the Kites move on to the final.
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