Two former winners

It's quite surprising to realize that they both won the tournament a few years ago. It had completely slipped my mind. They're not really the kind of profiles you instinctively think of as performing well here. Yet, that's exactly the case.

Careful here, because Baez shows a great track record at this tournament with a title, then a quarterfinal and a round of 16, but in reality, as often happens when he’s seeded these last few years, he’s only won a single match on his last two visits. That’s not all that impressive, I mostly feel like his 2023 win was more of a one-off than anything else. He seems to want to come back every year because he likes the tournament or because he has good memories of it, but it’s clear that over the last two years, it hasn’t been a good version of Baez at this event.

Basically, he’s not a player who particularly benefits from the conditions. His serve quality is still very basic. And in the rallies, I’d even say it can kind of work against him, because he’s a player who likes to hit hard from both sides and can be aggressive when he’s not facing heavy defense. It’s hard to control the ball in these conditions and he can start spraying errors quickly, especially on the forehand side, as we know.

Kecmanovic also won the tournament in 2020. That’s starting to go back a bit, and it’s especially strange because he never played it again afterward. He benefits a bit more from the altitude conditions because he serves fairly well. He also has good aggression on both wings. Last week in Gstaad, he showed he can play well in these conditions. For a set and a half, I’d say he was better than JM Cerundolo. Then his intensity dropped and he got punished. The level was still very good overall and I thought he looked in good shape. He leads Baez 3–0 in their head-to-heads, with wins on several surfaces. And the matches are often tight, which doesn’t surprise me. He’s also a player who can have dips in intensity during his matches, but he knows how to bounce back.

Baez played a great match in Bastad against De Jong, but before that he struggled against a local player in the first round and then took a heavy beating from Rublev. That makes just one good match for the Argentine, who is really in free fall this season, and I’m choosing my words carefully. Does his nice win last week mean he’s about to step it up in the coming weeks, or are those two other more mediocre matches a more accurate reflection of what we should expect next? Personally, I don’t trust him at all, unlike Kecmanovic who generally plays at his level and you more or less know what to expect from him.