A calm sea has never made a good sailor!

And yes, that’s exactly how I feel going into the analysis of this match, because even if the Croatian has had a bit of a dip in form lately, we have to say that clay doesn’t really suit him at his age, and the grass season is short and he played Daniil Medvedev twice, which is not a very good match-up for him. You never know with the Croat, he’s always very hard to beat, and I think you probably have to look at him again through the prism of hard courts, where he was at the very start of the season and came in at a better level. Maybe he’ll start off a bit slowly, like he has at times, before gaining confidence and rolling out some pretty decent tennis. He did that a while back, and knowing that he’s taken a bit more than a month of vacation away from competition, he might need a bit of tuning before he really gets going, especially since on the other side, Shimabukuro hasn’t really stopped. He kept playing tournaments after Wimbledon, with Los Cabos and Montreal. He beat the well-known young Norwegian here in qualifying, but we’re not very positive about the Norwegian’s level, so we can’t really take too much from that. The Japanese player, though, what I can say is that he impressed me over part of the grass-court season, primarily thanks to his returning quality. If he manages to deprive Marin Čilić of a few free points on serve, or at least make him doubt, it’s not a bad match-up and it’s not a bad factor for him. He returns well, not like Daniil Medvedev, but like Shimabukuro or Safiullin, with both feet inside the court, putting on the pressure. Of course, he has to be in good form to get the ball in the court regularly enough, but in his favor, he has plenty of match rhythm in his legs. Given that the ball in Montreal seems a bit hard to control, I’d expect a better start to the match from the Japanese player, and after that, it’ll depend on how the Croat reacts, and I wouldn’t be able to commit to predicting a final winner.