Thumbs Down: When Stan Wawrinka decided to pull out of the Moselle Open in Metz at the last moment, citing fatigue, he was apparently so tired that he couldn’t lift the telephone to call the promoters and give them the bad news. Instead, he emailed them. It was a particularly tough blow for the tournament because he had an “agreement”—read: appearance fee—with the event, and his likeness had been used to promote it. In a rare bout of honesty (promoters are notoriously leery of offending players, and for good reason), tournament organizers admitted that they were “extremely disappointed and angry.”
Granted, Wawrinka was involved in a successful Davis Cup semifinal tie the previous weekend, but he played just one singles match, which he won in straight sets, and he was stopped in the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open almost a week before that. So the workload for the world No. 4 certainly was heavy, but not impossible. So much for meeting obligations—ones you sought out.
Thumbs Up: ATP No. 39 Joao Sousa and No. 56 David Goffin each had one tour title before they met in the Metz final. It was Goffin who claimed his second, adding to a resurgence that started shortly after he fell out of the Top 100 in April. The Belgian has now won 34 of his last 36 matches, mostly on the Challenger tour—he has three Challenger titles in 2014—and he’s up to a career-high ranking of No. 32.
Quite a stat: Along with Pablo Cuevas, Goffin is the only other player to win at least two Challenger and two ATP World Tour titles this season.
Thumbs Up: Twenty-two-year-old Karolina Pliskova of the Czech Republic rewrote the hoary cliché last week as she found herself fourth-time lucky. After losing all three finals she had played in this year, Pliskova managed to win a title in Seoul, defeating Varvara Lepchenko, who had upset top-seeded Agnieszka Radwanska. Pliskova, No. 32 at the start of the tournament, was also a finalist the previous week in Hong Kong (she lost to Sabine Lisicki).
Thumbs Down: Not enough top Spanish players bothered to answer the call of Davis Cup two weekends ago, and as a result, the nation that has dominated the competition for almost a decade-and-a-half (five championships since 2000) is out of the World Group. For the first time in 18 years, Spain has been relegated to minor zonal play.
On top of that, Spanish Davis Cup captain Carlos Moya has resigned. When Moya was made captain less than a year ago, he boasted of his close relations with all the top Spanish players. Now he says his main reason for stepping down is that almost all the Spanish players he tried to recruit while at the U.S. Open a few weeks ago blew him off.
"Everything was complicated with the injury to Rafa,” Moya told the Spanish newspaper El Pais. “I went with an idea to New York, but I did not think that the other Spanish in the Top 100 were going to say injury, or calendar, lack of motivation.”
Moya declined to criticize any individual players, blaming his problem on the demanding and awkward nature of the competition. Former WTA player Gala Leon Garcia was appointed captain on Sunday.