It's hard to hold back

Kopriva is still a huge outsider, yet he keeps racking up good matches and surprises. It’s getting hard not to click on him all the time.

Impressive win against Buse today, despite a brief lapse in the first set where he let a 5–1 lead slip to 5–5. After that, he got back on track and rolled. He’s a really surprising player, capable of playing at a very high level and dictating play intelligently. I really love what he’s doing. For me, it’s no surprise to see him performing at this level. He’s beating good-quality players. Now he’s facing his nemesis, in the form of Quinn, whom he’s never beaten in three meetings, including one right here last year in qualifying in a very tight match. He’s still taken a step forward since then. And Quinn was in great form last year too, let’s not forget that.

The context of Quinn’s three wins is mainly that the match-up as a whole seems to favor the American. He’s a player who relies heavily on short points, and especially on his serve, which is his biggest weapon, but he also knows how to come to the net and attack hard from the baseline. That’s kind of what hurts Kopriva, and that’s where I see him struggling the most every time.

The conditions are still just as extreme and the courts very fast. Kopriva pointed out how important it is to serve and return well. He also indirectly admits that this type of conditions and court suits players like Quinn, whom I still find dangerous, even if he sometimes has really poor matches where his game just doesn’t work, and in that case he simply has no plan B. I’d say that for me, Kopriva is still the better player in terms of quality and tennis. He can do a huge number of things and would almost deserve to be the favorite if we only went by that, but the match-up and the head-to-heads make Quinn maybe a slight favorite in this match.