The tennis madman

Rublev is still on the verge of exploding, but he’s just put together two “decent” first rounds, and in tennis everything moves very fast..

I don’t want to be too hard on Rublev because, for once, he strings together two wins without dropping a set—that hasn’t happened since Hamburg! I have mixed feelings about his first two rounds: against Fearnley he had a relatively favorable matchup in the sense that he could hit big in rhythm pretty much all the time (and Fearnley handed him a bunch of gifts, notably 11 doubles). His second round was good overall except for the start of the second set, where he came very close to getting double-broken and going down 0–4; he was already starting to get tight, and in a third set I’m not sure the match plays out the same. So there’s already some positive stuff in his game and in actually closing matches—that’s good—but I’m not forgetting he’s not at his prime yet; the serve was too inconsistent: it’s either an ace/near-winner, or a double fault or a really limp second serve. Here he is in the third round without being perfect, but he’s there. Shelton is harder to read. We expected to see him short on rhythm like in Shanghai and Vienna since his return, but this time we saw prime Shelton against a solid Cobolli. Impeccable serving, not afraid to hang in long baseline rallies, and lethal when he needs to pull the trigger on the forehand—nothing to say, it was a perfect Shelton. He erased my doubts about his current form, and with the day off he should be fine, right? My caveat about the matchup is that if Shelton is a bit too passive from the baseline and just waits, then Rublev can feast by hitting everything in rhythm. For me, Shelton needs to lock him on the backhand side and keep him from dictating too much. The American found the right mix during the US swing, and in his first round here it was the same again, so I think he’s in good enough shape to handle Rublev, no?