Strong Start Incoming

Good matchup to start things off for Raducanu in New York City.

The market has taken a strong stance behind the British No. 1 and it isn't exactly hard to see why. Not only is she far more well known, but she's more established, more talented and more well rounded.

The question becomes does this elevated game spread provide value or not? That question requires a little more digging and the answer is more nuanced. As of right now, I don't have a bet on this one, but the matchup and circumstances certainly favour Raducanu and I'm not sure what Shibahara does well that could trouble Raducanu.

The first serve can find her some points, but Raducanu is actually pretty adept at starting points against strong servers. From the baseline, I don't think Shibahara has enough pace to hit through Raducanu and the errors can be a big troublesome. She doesn't move more effectively and I don't think her return game against strong players is quite strong enough to find breaks consistently.

She may lean on her doubles background and come to net, which would help neutralize some of Raducanu's superior movement, but it's not enough for me to think she keeps things close. Unless Raducanu is going to be uncharacteristically error prone, she has the ability to win by margin - something she's done consistently across surfaces against lower ranked opposition. I'm not one to just bet solely on trends, but we've seen enough wins by 6+ games from Raducanu against even better opposition than this to think that there's signal and not just noise (Olga Danilovic, Peyton Stearns and Elena Gabriela Ruse all fit that description, while Naomi Osaka was dealt a shock defeat by margin by Raducanu as well).