Tennis Days With Dave Gertler

It's been a fantastic Australian Open, and a very revealing grand slam in general. Along with the drama off and around the court, we've had some spectacular tennis, and some incredibly meaningful results. I'm joined by Pete Ziebron (@tennisacumen) to go over in great detail what we've learnt and what we've observed about Nick Kyrgios, Madison Keys, Stan Wawrinka, Vika Azarenka, Tomas Berdych and the Big Four.  We also make our finals predictions.

One of my absolute favourite players on the tour, of whom we've still not seen nearly enough since he broke out onto the scene with some big showings at slams in 2012, David Goffin has been well and truly on the comeback trail lately, having been officially recognised by the ATP for his efforts as such in 2014. Currently at his career-high ranking of 22, he came into the Apia International as the 2nd seed, but both he and top seed Fabio Fognini lost in their first matches, and have both had less than ideal starts to 2015. Hope you enjoy this brief chat I had with my much-better-tennis-playing namesake in the Players' Lounge at the Apia International in early Jan. More episodes coming soon!

A brand new episode of Tennis Days for you! While I was covering the Apia International in Sydney, I had a chance to take my voice recorder into some interviews with some of our favourite players, and ask them meaningful questions about their career, and how they see things.  We're looking forward to offering up this audio over the next series of episodes, and we really hope you like them too. In this episode, there's a focus on Julien Benneteau and also Juan Martin del Potro, who - while Matt Johnson and I were in the middle of recording our chat - pulled out of the 2015 Australian Open. So we end the episode with Delpo's first press conference in Sydney, his first tournament back after 10 months. He is asked, and talks a lot about his wrist. Many more cool eps on the way. Please subscribe on iTunes - where we'd love you to help us out by rating and reviewing the show - as well as Stitcher, TuneIn Radio and... well, just the Internet, I guess. As well as reviews helping Tennis Days be more searchable, w

Matt Johnson (@matte_johnson) has been embedded in Pat Rafter Arena and the outside courts of the Queensland Tennis Centre over the past week, soaking up all the tennissy goodness that we’ve been following from all over the world. Great to get his thoughts on the tournament leading into the men’s final. Please subscribe to Tennis Days on iTunes or your favourite podcasting app! Tweet us at @davegertler, @TennDaysPodcast or leave a review on iTunes if you have any feedback.

Jared Pine from Secondserb.blogspot.com joins me today from La Verne, California, to talk about the latest post on his stats-focussed, and very engaging blog. Jared is a student of mathematics and a writer by trade, and he spends a lot of time watching, thinking and writing about tennis. He shares his tweets at @jaredpine and on his blog secondserb.blogspot.com which is a more complex play on words than it sounds initially - he explains it in our chat, which I'm hoping is the first of many! Thank you for listening, subscribing in iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn Radio and/or the podcatcher of your taste. If you have been enjoying these episodes lately, please tweet me @davegertler, or the podcast @TennDaysPodcast ..Or, if you REALLY want to help us out, go to the Tennis iTunes Store page and leave a rating and a review here: https://itunes.apple.com/au/podcast/tennis-days-with-dave-gertler/id695328496?mt=2

2015 has begun with a buzz (of the caffeinated variety if you happen to be Serena Williams at Perth's Hopman Cup) but @davegertler is talking today with TennisAcumen.com's Pete Ziebron (@tennisacumen) about what's going down in Brisbane at the Brisbane International where some the world's best are starting their Australian Open series. Things are about to get real when on Tuesday, we see top seeds Roger Federer, Maria Sharapova, Ana Ivanovic, Milos Raonic and Kei Nishikori begin to play their second-round matches. At the same time, both draws are absolutely stacked with great players from all over the world, including many Aussie stars.   Enjoy the first episode of Tennis Days for 2015, and don't forget to subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio.

Well, the off season has been short, and if you blinked, you probably missed it. But not as much as we all missed tennis in this IPTL era. @matte_johnson and @davegertler nonetheless try and bring it to you as straight down the line as we can, making some interesting tennis- (and otherwise-) related New Year's resolutions along the way, also discussing the Brisbane International, which Matt will be attending (and live tweeting from!).   We at Tennis Days thank you so, so much for joining us on our 2014 ride, and we can't wait to keep bringing you more and more of the good stuff over 2015. Good luck with your resolutions and we wish you the absolute best for the New Year, with many tennis days ahead.

Phoenix's very own Pete Ziebron joined has joined us on the Tennis Days Podcast for a chat about the Martina Navratilova/Aga Radwanska coaching hire, as well as other news going round on the coaching carousel during this off-season.   Pete has had a wealth of experiences in the tennis world, and shares his insights with us on the current game, and also makes a few interesting predictions about movers and shakers in the coming year.   Pete's website TennisAcumen.com is a great reseource of insider tennis analysis and perspective, and you can also follow Pete on Twitter at @TennisAcumen.   Because of the events in my home town Sydney, there has been a delay of about a week between the recording and the release of this episode. It's worth mentioning that in that time, Tomas Berdych, whose coaching situation Pete and I discuss, has hired Danny Vallverdu and Azuz Simcich.

As we round out Season 2 of Tennis Days, we have another awesome episode outlining two of the big tennis events from last week - The Davis Cup Final, and the Newcombe Medal awards night in Melbourne. We opened up our seismic can of fish about these events on the night before the results were known, and the intrigue, mystery and suspense was in full flow. Matt had also just emerged from writing this fantastic preview about the Newcombe Medal, which perhaps foreshadowed the result much more effectively than my prediction. Matt actually attended the Newcombe Medal the following night, so was there to witness the result first-hand. Audio from the Necombe Medal comes from Tennis Australia's YouTube Channel's live broadcast of the event. Thanks so much for listening, subscribing, rating and/or reviewing the podcast on iTunes and/or Stitcher. Follow us on Twitter @matte_johnson @davegertler or just @TennDaysPodcast

On the eve of the semifinal stage of the ATP Barclay's World Tour Finals in November, I had the pleasure of chatting to British tennis journalist James Peeling from mootennis.com, a thorough and rich source of match reports, previews and feature articles, usually with more of a WTA than ATP focus, but as necessitated by the end of the WTA season, James' focus has shifted well and truly onto the ATP Finals. James is a wealth of knowledge on Czech players Lucie Safarova and Petra Kvitova, and he shares his enthusiasm about them with me (which is totally preaching to the converted, but I still enjoyed hearing about it!) Enjoy the latest episode of the Tennis Days Podcast, and don't forget to subscribe on iTunes, and if you like, rate and review the podcast, as well as follow James on Twitter at @MooTennisBlog!

Tennis Days is not a comedy podcast, nonetheless there may be sections of this episode including predictions about the Barclay's World Tour Finals - which at the time of recording was a day away from commencing - which have you laughing out loud, considering the way things have gone for certain players. @Matte_Johnson and @Davegertler put their predictions out there, and also talk a little about the significance of the Djokovic/Federer battle for year-end No.1. Matt talks about a charity fund-raiser he is doing, and for more info about that, click here. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast, we'd love to hear from you on twitter, or email davegertler@yahoo.com with your feedback or suggestions.

Thanks for listening and subscribing to the Tennis Days Podcast. Regular co-host Matt Johnson will be back next episode when we preview the World Tour Finals in London. For updates on coming episodes, follow @TennDaysPodcast on twitter.   I decided to use this little podcast-producing window of opportunity to showcase some great player interviews that I did while I was in the US a few months ago. Hope you enjoy the 'Sam Grothcast'.  

Thanks again for listening to Tennis Days. In case you're hard-pressed for time and can't discover all the content in this 47-minute episode right now, you can skip to 30:30 to hear an Apia International press conference, speakers inluding Craig Gabriel, Alistair MacDonald and Nick Kyrgios. We have a nice, big chunky Tennis Days Podcast for you to sink your teeth into this week. @Matte_johnson and @Davegertler discuss what we have learned from the WTA Finals, including standout performances from Wozniacki, Halep and Serena. In an episode littered with meaningful tangents, I share with Matt one of my famous metaphors where I compare tennis with the natural phenomena of waves crashing onto a beach. Matt has trouble with this metaphor, as he is from Melbourne, where beaches with waves are not so common. Before leaving you with some audio of a recent Nick Kyrgios press conference in Sydney (which also features intro speeches from Apia International Media Manager @crosscourt1, Tournament Director @MacDonald_Ali,

If you don’t find ‘year-end championships’ interesting or relevant, you need to listen to this podcast. As the WTA Finals embark on their first year hosted by Singapore, one by one the players have arrived in the island nation state to settle the business that was the 2014 WTA season. Four slams, four different winners, Serena looking dodgy until the business end of the season, Sharapova and Williams yet to face each other in a final this year. With a little sub-feud opening up between Sharapova and Ivanovic, and bullying relationship seeming to be developing between Petra Kvitova (Wimbledon) and Eugenie Bouchard (Three slam semis and one final), un-controversial world No.3 Simona Halep barely rates a mention, yet she’s due for another statement tournament. Will this be it? And who’s this Agnieszka Radwanska that everyone keeps talking about? Well, she’s not been outside the world’s top 6 since February 2012 – surely she’s in there with a chance as well, r

Going by their 2014 rivalry, Matt "ships" Federer as the winner of his Shanghai Rolex Masters semi-final against Novak Djokovic, who hasn't lost in Asia since 1913. Matt also discusses the freakishly close head-to-head rivarly being hotly contested between these two future Hall of Famers. Concluding it's Federer's 'turn' to win, Matt and I both nonetheless (oh so wrongly) predict Djokovic to come through as victor. Dave breaks some "news" about Venus Williams and Feliciano Lopez (completely unrelated to each other) gleaned from observations he made at airports in America. Matt, equipped with perceptive journalistic idea, extrapolates what he can from Dave's observations. Finally, to make up for my terrible prediction that Federer would get beat by Djokovic in the Shanghai semi, I'm adding some audio at the end from a press conference in Cincinnati, where Federer answered a goofy question I asked him, in great non-goofy detail. Hopefully, this will make Federer fans out there hate me less for predicting he wou

Welcome to a mini episode of the Tennis Days Podcast. Just a quick snippet from a longer conversation I had with Matt Johnson (@matte_johnson) over Skype. With the Asian Swing heading towards its climax in Shanghai, Matt and I focussed mainly on the ATP events in Beijing and Tokyo, as well as analysing the draw of the Rolex Masters 1000 which is currently taking place.We hope to bring you that full episode over the next few days, but in the meantime, here's a juicy part of our convo where we focus on some of the life lessons we can take away from Julien Benneteau's painful tenth consecutive loss in the final of an ATP event, which took place at the hands of Kei Nishikori in Malaysia two weeks ago.Hope you enjoy and stay tuned for the full episode coming soon, follow me @davegertler for updates, and thanks for listening!

Welcome back to the Tennis Days Podcast, where Matt Johnson and I reunite for the first time since before the US Open Series began. Finding our feet as your favourite Australian tennis-based podcast once again, we hope you bear with us as we discuss mainly WTA results and trends at the top of the game, as seen over the last couple of months. I also bring in some of the experiences I have had recently as credentialed media at US tennis tournaments. Please stay tuned for more regular episodes of Tennis Days coming up in the next few months leading up to the WTA and ATP end-of-year events and then, of course, the Australian Open swing in December/January. Also chopped in at the end of the episode is a bit of audio from a press conference in Cincinnati with Ana Ivanovic where she talks about the match that she'd just finished up against Maria Sharapova, quite a controversial moment that Matt and I talk about in the podcast. The journalists that you hear asking Ivanovic questions, in order of appearance, are Court

Hi Folks! Thanks for tuning in to the first episode of Tennis Days that's been recorded from a remote location. And by remote, I mean, the greatest city in the world, New York City. Yo! But while the world has been flipped upside down, the time difference between North America and Southern Australia has only become more conducive to well-balanced podcast chat that spans the hemispheres of the tennis world. In other words, it's @matte_johnson and @davegertler bringing thoughts to your ears about very important tennis matches happening at a very important time in the tennis world, Wimbledon, across a backdrop of generational change. Or is it?

Before the Wimbledon draw ceremony took place, the 32 seeds in both the men’s and women’s tournaments were announced. But! Before the seeds were announced, @matte_johnson applied the ‘Wimbledon fomula’ to the ATP players going into this 3rd grand slam of 2014, and co-hosted an episode of Tennis Days with @davegertler where he talked about his findings, which can be read at http://theminibreak.wordpress.com/2014/06/16/tentative-wimbledon-mens-seedings/   This also sparked a wider discussion about the state of the tour at this midway point of the 2014 tennis season. Hope you enjoy the tennis days podcast and continue to tune in as Dave posts episodes from the road, while covering the US Open Series for Tennis Panorama News.

After we signed off on the French Open Finals part of our chat, Nick stayed on the line to tell me his thoughts on the Big Four, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray. Thanks for tuning in, subscribing and following me on twitter @davegertler – any feedback of show-related questions can be emailed to davegertler@yahoo.com