Analysis for Ferrer-Hrbaty (ATP Australian Open)

Head-to-head record 4:3

Here comes our favourite once again. Experienced Slovak Dominik Hrbaty will play David Ferrer in the second round. Ferrer is especially known for his fighting spirit and unwillingness to concede defeat. He is known as a particularly dangerous clay court player, though he has had several respectable results on hard courts as well, especially his back-to-back semifinal appearances at the NASDAQ-100 Open in 2005–2006 and his semifinal appearance at the 2007 US Open. He is an experienced player who broke into the top 10 in the ATP Tour singles rankings for the first time in 2006. His highest ranking to date is World No. 4, which he reached on 25 February 2008. However, he has been struggling a bit since that time and his results from the end of the last year were pretty poor. He doesn’t look much better here in Melbourne as he fought against poor German Gremelmayr in five sets. We think that Dominik Hrbaty is going to hive him even harder time and wouldn’t be surprised if second round would be the final station for Spaniard. He will face experienced Slovakian in the first round. Like we said, Hrbatý has won six ATP titles and has been ranked as high as No. 12 in the world at 18 October 2004. He has been known for high fighting spirit and excellent performance in team competitions - Davis Cup and Hopman Cup - regularly beating higher positioned players. In 2009, he surprisingly won Hopman Cup for Slovakia along with Dominika Cibulkova. Hrbaty defeated Blake, Safin and Kiefer there and lost just once - in a very tight match to Hewitt. It was a world class performance and he continued in style beating Yani, Ghedin and Chiudinelli in qualifiers for Australian Open and Isner in the first round. Hrbaty plays in a great shape and we think he should be around 2.2 against out-of-form Ferrer.