If you had told me before the US Open started that the last man standing would not be one of the big four, I most certainly would not have predicted the champion to be Marin Cilic of Croatia.
Of the big four, Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Murray I was definitely hoping for a Federer triumph.
But of the possible outsiders who could take the title, Cilic was not on my radar.
As a Canadian I was rooting for Milos Raonic, however, deep down I still felt he was not playing the critical points in matches as a champion would and so those matches often slipped away. Although he has improved vastly, his ground strokes have become much more dependable over the past year, his time to win a major has not yet arrived.
Even though Stan Wawrinka broke through in January claiming the Australian Open title, his results the rest of the year have been mixed, and so i was not totally surprised that he was not in the final.
There was a lot of talk about Grigor Dimitrov becoming a first time slam winner but even though he has all the shots I could not see him gritting out a tough five set match against one of the larger and stronger top ten players.
There have also been a number of young players who have had strong showings this summer including on occasion Bernard Tomic. Showing the ability to beat the top player were both Nick Krygios and Alexandr Dolgopolov. I don’t think any of these rising players are at the point in their careers where they are capable of sustaining the high level of play required over the two weeks of a grand slam tournament and all three lost fairly early.
But the player I would have picked was Thomas Berdych. In fact every time a big tournament comes around I wonder if this is the moment the Czech will have his breakthrough. Of all the top players yet to win a major Berdych stands out to me as the one who has all the tools, and he has shown he can dig out of tough matches, and hang with the big four.
In the past few years Berdych has had mixed results at the majors. Although he reached the final at Wimbledon in 2010 defeating both Federer and Djokovic on the way to a loss to Nadal, his results at the slams are inconsistent. A strong semi final showing on the hard courts of the Australian Open in January of this year losing to the eventual champion Wawrinka, had me thinking perhaps he could pull it all together for the US Open. Berdych also showed some mental fortitude when he won three points in the Davis Cup tie against the Netherlands, where he won both his singles matches and his doubles match.
But in the quarter-finals Thomas Berdych ran into a red hot Marin Cilic, who routed him in three straight sets. And as they say, the rest is history. I guess the question remains, What happened to Thomas Berdych and will he ever win a major?
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