Peter Polansky falls just short against Juan Mónaco at Indian Wells

INDIAN WELLS, Calif. – Peter Polansky doesn’t create many opportunities for himself to play at the highest level of professional tennis.

So when he does, and then falls just short, it hurts just a little more.

The 25-year-old from Richmond Hill, Ont., who won two matches in qualifying to make the main draw, was oh, so close against Juan Mónaco Thursday in the first round at the BNP Paribas Open.

But close means going home, after a 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-4 defeat to a player who was in the top 10 less than two years ago but now, at No. 43, has struggled for the last six months to a year with health and confidence.

It was a terrific opportunity for Polansky; Mónaco didn’t play all that well, but just well enough to win.

Part of it was that Mónaco was a step up in level from the players Polansky beat in the qualifying; part of it was the fact that Mónaco remembered losing to Polansky in the first round of the 2010 U.S. Open, and came out with a vastly different game plan.

In the end, for two and a half hours, the two were almost playing their mirror images. There was a total of four aces. And while we didn’t keep official count of the trips to the net, the total for both players was about in that neighborhood.

Both Polansky and Mónaco, albeit with exactly 100 spots separating them in the rankings, have struggled with confidence and with closing out matches of late.

Polansky feels he’s the more aggressive of the two players. Certainly he serves harder, and he felt as though the two qualifying wins had given him wings of a sort, and that he could hold his own serve and have his chances on Mónaco’s serve.

“If he let up even a little bit, if his ball had been a little bit shorter, I probably would have been all over him. But he did an okay job staying in all the points, and defending really well,” Polansky said. “I think he played good enough to beat me; if he’d played any worse I might have won in straight sets.”

That 2010 match, a best-of-five set match in New York that Polansky won in straight sets over a Mónaco just back from wrist surgery, was a completely different deal: full of hard, flat balls, and a lot of hard hitting.

Polansky was a lot more confident back then, though. He had qualified for the main draw, which is a far more difficult proposition in a Grand Slam event, and had had a good summer before that.

This time, Mónaco’s lack of confidence might have helped him in the end; the safe, loopy balls he was producing made it difficult for Polansky to get on top of him.

And it meant there were some prodigiously long rallies – one, in particular, when Mónaco served for the match in the third set, ran 46 strokes and prompted a time violation warning from chair umpire Mohamed Lahyani when Mónaco took his time to recover before serving the next point.

Two Canadian men remain in the men’s singles draw, but neither is in action Friday – except in doubles.

Milos Raonic and Vasek Pospisil will play their singles Saturday; Pospisil and his Spanish partner Pablo Andujar will play the late-night match on the stadium court Friday night against the Spanish duo of Fernando Verdasco and David Marrero.