Mamma’s spaghetti!

3 wops in the quarter-finals of a Grand Slam, plain and simple...

I never would have seen this matchup in the quarterfinals. I had written off Berrettini like a lot of people, I think, because physically it just wasn’t holding up and he was sometimes taking heavy beatdowns when his opponent had the weapons to exploit his weakness on the backhand side. Arnaldi is the same: he struggled almost the whole season on clay, only to finally put up big performances in a Challenger and then in Rome. It’s a lesson for us bettors!

For this match, we of course have Matteo Arnaldi, who has spent more than 17 hours on court, and who survived his match against Tiafoe. Physically, he was better than the American, but what does he have left now? Can he pull a Mensik on us? The problem is that he doesn’t have the same weapons and his tennis style uses up more energy.

The thing is, on Berrettini’s side, you wonder how it’s even holding together. The guy strings injury after injury, and now all of a sudden he’s in the Roland Garros quarterfinals. I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets injured during the match, because his body is fragile.

In terms of match-up, both of them run around their backhand a lot. Arnaldi is more solid on the backhand side, but Berrettini makes up for it so well with his slice (and even his topspin backhand is decent at the moment). Arnaldi has a real shot as a good clay-courter who moves his opponents around well (what a match against Tiafoe), but everyone fears that physically he might be too limited, and we all see Berrettini’s Grand Slam experience as a huge argument in his favor.

So what do we do then? The two men have still never met in an official match at a big tournament. I haven’t seen the odds yet, but I’m afraid Berrettini is going to come out quite short...