Navone has struck again.

The Argentine put in a brilliant showing in Montreal, delivering the big stuff. This week, he’ll once again be someone to take seriously.

A win over Berrettini then Vacherot before losing quite heavily to Fils. You can say Navone had a successful tournament in Montreal and maximized his potential. We saw him very comfortable in relatively slow conditions, which allowed him to return well and make his opponents play. Whether it was Berrettini or Vacherot, they didn’t have enough weapons from the baseline to really trouble him once their serve was somewhat neutralized by the fact that Navone returns very well and forces a lot of rallies. On that point, we agree, and Navone excels in this area. That’s no surprise. However, two things are going to change for his next match.

First, the conditions in Cincinnati are much faster and the bounce is lower, which means Navone will be less comfortable trying to reproduce the same performances.

The second change will be his opponent’s profile. Collignon is not as dependent on his serve as the others. I’d categorize him as a player who’s strong in long efforts. He has pretty good stats against Navone’s profile. To me, he doesn’t shy away from rallies, he’s solid off both wings and has a good mentality. It’s true that he can be a bit erratic at times and mentally unstable, but his profile looks a bit less like an easy match-up for Navone.

I’m a bit less convinced by Collignon’s recent performances, as he hasn’t played very well since his final in Gstaad, which he lost to Tsitsipas. After that, he arrived exhausted in Kitzbühel, and then took a heavy loss to Popyrin in Montreal. I put his first loss to Altmaier into perspective quite a bit, because he was really tired; above all, he clearly wasn’t in the mindset to push himself. And his second defeat can also be explained by a necessary surface transition. It was a real trap of a first round, because Popyrin played a perfect match and prevented him from developing his game. Admittedly, setting everything else aside, Collignon didn’t leave me with a very good impression, but he’s only going to build momentum from here.

Navone leads the head-to-head 1–0, but it’s far too old and I didn’t see the match, so I can’t really draw anything from it. I think the match-up is decent for Collignon because, as I said, he’s a player capable of holding his own from the baseline and is less dependent on his serve than a whole bunch of other players. What bothers Navone is when he can’t find solutions from the back and his grinding game doesn’t annoy his opponent as much as it did against Berrettini or Vacherot, for example. For me, the Argentinian overperformed in Montreal thanks to the conditions and the style of his opponents, but those two factors are changing, and we need to reassess how dangerous he is this week.