Juan Manuel pulled the same trick on us again.

The Argentinian has beaten Ruud once more and this time wants to win the tournament. But he still has two high-level matches to play.

It's pretty weird because on the one hand, Cerundolo is winning matches against opponents of a good level and he's pulling through once again, but I feel less like he's dangerous compared to last year, even though he was simply playing worse last year. I feel like he's squeezing through the eye of a needle several times this week, already from the first round, then against Kecmanovic where he was close to losing in straight sets before turning it around, and same thing against Ruud where he came very close to a straight-set loss. The Argentine has a great mentality and a fairly solid baseline game to help him pull off his comebacks, but it's hanging by a thread at the moment, and he also served less well today. That's kind of what's holding me back.

And paradoxically, even though Collignon is also winning his matches with difficulty without being dominant, I find him even more dangerous this week in these conditions. So yes, he's down 3–0 in the head-to-head against Cerundolo. But I'm wondering if these altitude conditions aren't good enough for him to finally manage to win this time. It's true that we tell ourselves he should have destroyed Cerundolo on grass, but in Eastbourne it was super slow with quite a bit of wind. And it was also hard to create separation in the rallies once the point was established. This week, we can see that big servers and aggressive players are extremely hard to beat. And Cerundolo stands very far back on the return, which still leaves the initiative to his opponent. The Argentine is good on return, but there’s a risk in being too good at it. And to me, Collignon’s game can really bother him despite their head-to-head.