The cauldron

The BNP Arena on a Saturday with crowd favorite Cobolli and a red‑hot Atmane. Yes daddyyyy!

And yes, of course that’s the first thing that comes to mind: does this really benefit the local player Cobolli? Atmane loves this kind of atmosphere and especially confrontation. He can also get tight from nerves, and therefore get cramps. It’s a double‑edged sword. But for a large part of the match, he’s going to lock himself in his bubble. In any case, we’ve got a nice forehand battle on our hands in particular. It’ll come down to who manages best to impose his game with his forehand: Cobolli looking to create an opportunity from the forehand crosscourt, Atmane doing the same from the other crosscourt.

The two players know each other very well, having already played twice, known each other since the juniors, and having teams that are quite close.

They’re both in good form, but there’s a big wrench in the works: Flavio has NEVER done well in Rome. I remember last year against Nardi, he looked very tense and got bogged down in the baseliner battle. Hard to know if that’ll be the case today, but we’re still talking about 6 appearances without any kind of result. You could say that precisely this time he’ll want to make it count, right?

If the Italian won the last territorial battle with his forehand (and his return), he had lost the one before that. Their matches are generally quite tight. You’ll have to choose between Cobolli’s potential tension and the speed of the court, which could bother Atmane (he said he preferred the slightly heavier clay against Zizou because it gave him more time to set up his game).