Archive: the-big-four
Here's the final installment. The draw looks very good for Federer. Djokovic, Murray, Raonic, Wawrinka and Tsonga all in the other half. Ferrer, Berdych, Monfils and Gasquet fight it out for the privilege of playing Roger in the semis after he deals with Dimitrov in the quarters.
I started out this series of articles to emphasize the importance of the six week season from the week of the Washington D.C. tournament before Toronto through to the end of the US Open. I ended up talking more about the Big Four and how they have attained and maintained their dominance over the field since September 2008, almost 6 years ago.
If you take a look at Part 2 of this series on the Big Four, you will see that since they first took up the first four slots on September 8, 2008 only in 2009 when Del Potro won the US Open and 2012 when Rafa was out for the last half of the year and David Ferrer had a great year has anyone else been able to pierce the 6000 point barrier.
When Andy Murray reached #4 in the world on September 8, 2008, the Big Four had arrived. Here are the top 5 year end and mid-year(after Wimbledon) rankings and the point totals from 12/25/2006 to this year after Wimbledon.
I decided to try to write an article on how important the tournaments are the next 3 weeks and really the next 6 weeks including the US Open, but I felt the best way to illustrate that was to show how important these events have been to the Big Four: Federer, Djokovic, Nadal and Murray.
