Battle of Frenchy

Rinderknech is supposed to be superior to Tabur, and even more so in these conditions, but the reality could be very different.

Last year, Rinderknech had a great run at Wimbledon, but then he crashed out heavily in this tournament afterwards, with quite little motivation in the end. He’s a player with a pretty clear pattern that’s easy to identify: he performs very well against top players in big matches that matter. We saw it again against Djokovic on the prestigious Wimbledon Centre Court. He managed to take a set and held his own for part of the match. His problem is managing to win matches with lower stakes, where you have to really dig deep and win by playing a more grinding, less brilliant kind of tennis, let’s say.

He seems to have played rather well in the Bundesliga, which is the equivalent of team matches in France, with a very tight loss against Etcheverry and a win over Basilashvili. Nothing exceptional, but I can understand that he was motivated. Here, we’re talking about team matches with a bit of a stake. It’s harder to perform afterwards at an ATP 250 with few spectators, against another Frenchman who is, on paper, clearly inferior to him. That’s where the traps are for Rinderknech.

I also want to highlight Tabur’s good level over the last few weeks. He seems to have had a little breakthrough for his standards, with a really convincing level of play and nice aggressiveness. He’s a player who can do damage in this kind of conditions and, contrary to the idea I had of him as having an average level of play, I think right now he’s slightly overperforming and should at least be taken seriously at the moment.

He’s coming through qualifying after beating some fairly solid players, including Huesler, who is always dangerous at altitude and was also playing at home. He then backed it up today against Rodionov in a three-set match that he still largely dominated. We’ve got a Tabur who is in form, confident, and with good match rhythm. As I said, this really feels like a trap for Rinderknech.

Now that the trap has been somewhat revealed, we also need to look at the odds and see what the best bet will be, because Rinder is still an excellent server who can also just hold serve and get through in tie-breaks, for example.