By Mike McIntyre

Back at the Rogers Cup in Toronto and have some time before the Frank Dancevic/Novak Djokovic match begins. Frank had the Canadian crowd on its feet at several moments last night as he dispatched of Mario Ancic in straight sets. Dancevic brought his "A" game and for two sets looked as if he belonged with the top players on tour. He has shown flashes of this type of brilliance in the past year, with wins over top ranked players such as Andy Roddick, Fernando Verdasco, and most recently David Nalbandian at Wimbledon.

Battling injuries at the start of 2008 hampered his continued progress and his ranking has dipped again towards 100th in the world. It will be tough to prevent further deterioration of that ranking as he has quarter final points to defend from a year ago when he impressively made it to the quarter finals in Montreal. In that tournament he took Rafael Nadal to a decisive third set. Lets see how he fares tonight against another top notch player like Djokovic. The Serb may be rusty due to a lack of match play since his surprise second round defeat at the All England Club.

Earlier today Center Court was treated to its first glimpse of top American ace, Andy Roddick. Roddick's trademark cannon serve was looking good and he got by Nicolas Mahut of France in three sets. In his post match press conference, Roddick stated he feels healthy and ready to go this summer.

"Physically I feel good for the first time since probably we finished our Davis Cup tie in April," Roddick said.

Despite his early defeat at Wimbledon, he said, "But I got to go home and have two or three weeks of actually really good training."

Roddick should get a few matches under his belt this week between the singles and doubles. An intriguing quarter final matchup with Roger Federer is looming. Roddick managed a rare win in their last encounter and will no doubt need to be in top shape to try to repeat that feat here.

Two of the other matches I was able to catch today involved Canas vs Soderling and Bjorkman vs Clement. Canas started strong against Soderling, but eventually blew a late first set lead and dropped the match 7-5, 6-1. I was hoping this would be a closer match between two very solid players, but it did not pan out. Canas looked frustrated in his practice session yesterday against Nikolay Davydenko and that carried over into today. Having a negative attitude in practice foreshadowed today's result. Soderling looked good and has the potential to be a top twenty player on tour. Injuries have been a problem for him in recent years, but hopefully he holds up this week. When speaking to Swedish veteran Jonas Bjorkman yesterday, he revealed that Soderling is the one they all look to now to carry their hopes on the ATP tour.

As for Bjorkman, he had his first round match today against another veteran, Arnaud Clement. It was nice to see these two battle it out, as they bring such a skilled repertoire of shots to the court. Clement lost steam in the third set and Bjorkman's touch at the net proved to be too much for the Frenchman. Prior to the match I overheard a conversation between two spectators that proved to be amusing. One leaned to the other and said, "Bjorkman is like 45 years old....or at the very least 40!" Poor Jonas, he's not that old yet!

Off to watch the Dancevic/Djoker match now. More to come soon!