Sacred Navone!

The Argentine is a nightmare to play against, even on hard courts. Fils will have to watch out for him like the plague.

After that win over Berrettini, people were wondering if it wasn’t just a one-off flash in the pan for Navone, because on fast courts he has his limits and Vacherot seemed better equipped to deal with his style. In the end, Navone repeated his feat and once again managed to impose his pace and his game until he completely blew his opponent away. His return quality, his defense, his movement on courts that actually aren’t that fast are huge assets, especially when he’s up against players who lack solutions to make the difference. We saw Vacherot use his net game, which is interesting, but it’s not easy to create the opportunities to come forward either.

He’s just beaten two players who rely heavily on their serve quality and on the first few shots. Even if Vacherot isn’t bad from the baseline, he likes to capitalize on his first serve and follow it to the net, as I said. Once he got pinned back from the baseline, he couldn’t make the difference either. Now we’re dealing with a slightly different profile with Fils, who is less dependent on his serve quality and has more power off both wings.

The Frenchman had a pretty strange match against Svazda in the first round. The American imposes a special kind of rhythm in his matches because he can hit winners from anywhere, but he can also rack up a lot of errors. At the start, I found Arthur too messy, with poor serve quality and the kind of body language you see on bad days. But the Frenchman accepted that he had to work more. Little by little, he played his way into the match. The score looks a bit disjointed and scrappy, but in the end I think it was a good way for him to get back into the swing of things. Let’s not forget he’d only played one match since Wimbledon, and that was last week against Jodard, where we left him with a big question mark about his hip. Apparently, it’s better now. He says his real comeback tournament is this one, rather than Washington, because he didn’t feel ready there. In other words, he’s probably going to build up his level. And given that the tournament is wide open, he’d be well advised to make life easy for himself today.

The problem is, I don’t really like the match-up for him if Navone manages once again to impose his pace. When Arthur has to do too much of the play and force things, that’s when he’s a bit less effective. He can especially get frustrated and end up trying super tough shots. That’s the pessimistic scenario. But on the other hand, he has the power to really hurt Navone. He also knows how to come to the net and has movement and physicality on his side. I’d even say that if he puts himself in a more defensive role by letting Navone dictate the play, that could almost be beneficial for him. But I don’t think that will be the case today. In any case, I’m not particularly excited by the match-up, because I don’t think it’s an easy match for him to handle, given that Navone is playing very well at the moment.