Washington & Poland - advice

Just the two tournaments to concentrate on this week and thankfully it's the penultimate clay court event of the year. I am totally sick of the red dirt and it's time to play some proper tennis on a proper surface instead of sliding around in vile red stuff and having to put my faith and hard earned in the hands of the likes of Jose Acasuso and Filippo Vollandri.

The clay event is in Sopot, Poland and looking at the draw yesterday it looks very much to me like I may as well chuck the tungsten at it and back whoever it lands on. We have the usual suspects in the field and as usual we have Davydenko and Robredo at the head of the market. These two should be avoided like the plague at the moment and that said one of them will probably go on to win, but they're both in poor form and can't be advised at the odds.

The bottom half of the draw looks the easier and common sense suggests that the pure clay courters, ie those that have no chance on hard courts will be trying that bit harder for a final chance of success with only the event in Bucharest to come in September. This narrows the list down to the likes of Massu, Horna, Volandri etc, but would you trust any of these characters with your wedge? I think not and so I wouldn't have anything like a decent bet on this event even if I was successful last week. The only wager I'm going to have is a two point win on Igor Andreev, purely because he hasn't won one of these yet and really should have done by now, he's in the good half and the odds are half decent. For an outside punt, it's always worth a couple of quid on Jose Acasuso in the slim hope of him making an effort. He showed signs of life last week and took Ferrer the distance so if you feel like a punt he could be the one.

Over in Washington, I've broken one of my golden rules of betting and backed Tommy Haas for victory in the Legg Mason Classic. The German was 11-2 with Bet365 yesterday, which is good value for a man who wins regularly on the US hard court season and has won early in the swing before. He is in the easier bottom half of the draw and I can't see anyone to touch him in his section unless Safin has a good week. The only problem of course, as ever with Haas, will be the possibility of a withdrawal through injury, but 11-2 is a decent enough price to chance it with, so a five point win is the bet. Andy Roddick will be a warm favourite, but Haas has a 6-3 career record over A-Rod and the American lost to Frank Dancevic a couple of days ago and is poor value at around 2-1 in the trickier side of the draw.