Newport and Euro Dirt wrap

It was a long drawn out week of tennis watching, the culmination of which ended with me tending gingerly to a couple of painful mouth ulcers and getting the calculator out to try and work out how and why I finished the week out of pocket.

My bets were very close to being perfect last week. I tipped and backed the winner of the Swiss Open, Paul-Henri Mathieu at 14-1 and also had the runners up in Newport (Nicolas Mahut, advised at 4-1) and in Bastad (Nicolas Almagro, advised at 8 to 1).

Sadly, I was still in bed when the semi's of the Swiss kicked off surprisingly early, and was shocked to see my other tournament bet, Igor Andreev losing to Andreas Seppi. Because I was sitting pretty with the faves in both semi's, it looked almost certain that I would have an all-profit final with Andreev the expected victor. It didn't turn out that way, but thanks to some nimble finger work I took advantage of some very generous laying of Seppi by a hapless punter during the final set and the subsequent breaker and ended up with an all profit final anyway. Mathieu took it - just about - but my profit was diminished rather by Andreev's defeat.

Over in Sweden, my man Almagro prevailed in a strange three setter against Carlos Moya in the semi's, so I layed him off at 5-2 for the match-up against David Ferrer, as I didn't feel that Almagro's streaky play would make much impression against the solid form of Ferrer. I was right, but the tournament yielded no profit as a result.

It was a similar story on the grass of Newport, as the worst case scenario of my tip Mahut having to play awkward veteran Fabrice Santoro transpired. No-one ever really knows what to expect in a Santoro match and Mahut looked bemused throughout, never playing to the best of his ability in a disappointing straight sets loss. As a Santoro precaution, I had layed Mahut at 8/13 before the match and came out with a small profit, but it was a disheartening performance from the young Frenchman.

All in all, thanks to my losing multiple and other minimum bet losses, I somehow managed to end the week down by 3 points, which isn't too bad, but it was looking so promising on Friday and it was a good week tipping-wise. Three finalists and a semi finalist from four tips is pretty good going by any standards and considerably better than the Racing Post's punts.