The Right Time?

Cobolli breezed through his opening round...

Well, we can't take too much from it. It would be natural to assume that Machac would come in with a point to prove after losing to Cobolli just last week in Vienna. However, he managed to come out even worse! Cobolli simply had to put a few balls back and thank Machac for almost giving him a BYE. Still, I want to give credit to Cobolli... it seems like the match against Sinner in Vienna fired him up again, he was looking like he was done for the season before that. And I'm expecting him to keep his intensity for the next match. He'll be facing Shelton, whom he lost to twice this year, both times in very competitive battles. This is Shelton's fourth match back since the injury... a loss to Goffin, almost a loss to Majchrzak, and then another quick loss to Munar. Perhaps it was due to having battled hard against Majchrzak in the previous round, but I found him very "shaky" against Munar. He struggled to get anything going on return, and his rally tolerance was not really there, which led to him rushing the net over and over, a bit too repetitively. While it's true that Shelton always remains dangerous due to his serve and power, could an opponent of this caliber be coming a bit too soon? Cobolli is quite familiar with Shelton; he is a good returner, and the courts are not that fast. If Ben has not improved his rally tolerance drastically since Vienna, it seems a tall task for him to hang with Cobolli here outside of the serve and +1. As you can tell, I like Cobolli's chance of avoiding a triple defeat to Shelton this year...