Ruud's Revenge Tour

Juan Manuel Cerundolo got annihilated; is Fonseca next?

It's safe to say that Casper was not in the mood to lose to the younger Cerundolo brother once again. He came in guns blazing from the first point, playing ultra-aggressively, hitting huge and taking the ball early, coming to the net, and just constantly rushing Juanma. I even saw him hit jumping backhand return winners deep inside the baseline! This is, of course, something very rare for Ruud, who tends to love a really deep returning position, back at the wall, à la Medvedev. Great game plan, perfectly executed... the Argentinian was shell-shocked! However, we might need to see a bit more from Ruud to really know what level he is at, right now. His loss in Wimbledon to Hurkacz was basically a courtesy visit in London, and the following matches in Gstaad to Faria and Juanma left us with a feeling that he needs to play a bit more to regain his level. Well, he got some swift revenge for the Gstaad loss against Cerundolo junior. What about the man who caused him to lose at Roland Garros this year?

Fonseca managed to win in straight sets against Tsitsipas in his opening round here... but honestly, it was not straightforward at all. His serve and forehand were not firing at all in the first set (neither was the rest of his game). He also gave a lot of balls to Tsitsipas' forehand, which is not ideal. Fortunately for him, the Greek, as is often the case, was not able to take advantage of Fonseca's slow start, and instead the Brazilian was the better player in the clutch moments. In the second set, his level rose a bit, especially his serving, which allowed him to set up some easy forehands and get that going. Fonseca has not played a lot of matches this year, and it might just have been some rust as well, but there was just no sign of him being really "killer" in that match.

It will be interesting to see how Ruud approaches this match. I'm not sure a heavy baseline battle is particularly in his favor, at least not from what we saw in Roland Garros. Although I will say that Fonseca was on "cloud nine" back then; he was just coming off a monstrous win against Djokovic, from two sets down. While Ruud could play very aggressively on return and really flatten out his strikes against Juanma, it might be a lot more difficult against someone like Fonseca. They will be playing in the evening session as well, so we will have slower conditions, which should actually benefit Fonseca. Something that could work in Ruud's favor is his fitness; we saw last night how brutal the conditions can be to play in... but I'm not sure I believe in it too much, especially since Ruud has not had a lot of sharp matches lately to build his match fitness up...