A second life

Trungelliti is an old hand, 36 years old with very few achievements on the main tour, but he’s still there fighting and might just play the tournament of his life?

I find this Argentinian really unusual, he wears weird outfits and has a Kotov‑style profile with a questionable physique, but he holds his own and plays really talented tennis. He’s got great hands and knows how to come to the net, which is rare for a clay-court specialist! He’s just won a Challenger and come through qualies AND he beat Rocha today, so he’s on an 8‑match winning streak, which is huge for a player like him. I’m going to have to be a bit of a killjoy though and say that he’s only beaten fairly secondary players during this run and that his ceiling isn’t that much higher. That said, he’s playing his best tennis and can still pull off an upset — over a single week, anything is possible!

He’s going to have to beat his nemesis Majchrzak, who leads 3–1 in the H2H with quite a few ‘recent’ matches (2 in 2024 and 2 in 2025). I think we could get a nice match between two players who are comfortable with the finesse game. Majchrzak has just escaped the JM Cerundolo trap as well; the match wasn’t perfect, but only 2 break points faced in three tough sets against that devil JM is impressive. In terms of the match content there were no flashes of brilliance, but I find the rhythm so tricky to handle that I’m really not worried. I saw him very focused and not chatty during the match; usually when he talks a lot and complains, that’s a bad sign, but this time he accepted the battle and came away with the win! I’m reassured, and I’ll be on his side again tomorrow...