Our in-form man of the moment!

Halys arrives straight after his title won in Kitzbühel. He still had to go through the qualifiers and is now on a streak of seven consecutive victories.

I saw Halys’s first qualifying round but not the second; it was against Kwon and I immediately felt he was having trouble adapting to the surface, which is normal when you have to make a transition. Little by little, he settled into his match and finished it properly. Apparently, he managed to follow up well against Bu, playing a very clean match statistically, but I didn’t see it. I think he mainly just needed a bit of time to adapt, but intrinsically he has the game to perform here. His serve is extremely effective, he’s solid from the baseline, and he’s also a player who knows how to push himself physically in these quite extreme conditions. He’s resilient. And if, on top of that, you add the confidence he currently has, it makes for a dangerous and explosive mix.

It’s not at all the same momentum on Kopriva’s side, as he’s winning few matches at the moment, even though his level of play is relatively solid. Recently, he beat Galarneau with a very good match in Montreal before being logically shut down by Lehecka. He struggles a bit more against aggressive profiles, good servers, and powerful players because they rush him and he can’t dictate play. I’ve always found him excellent against good baseliners because he’s intelligent and handles the game very well. The statistics don’t prove it, which seems rather strange to me, but conceptually it’s something that has come up repeatedly.

He has already beaten Halys in their only meeting in Rome last year, but the conditions are completely different this time and clearly favor Halys. If the Frenchman serves properly, he should get a good number of free points on his service games and could then manage to take advantage of Kopriva’s weak serve to hurt him and put him under pressure. I’m a bit worried about the weather conditions for the Frenchman because if the match is too intense and he gets pinned to the baseline, physically I don’t favor him over the Czech. But on the other hand, as I said above, he’s a resilient player who knows how to push himself and hang in there when matches are tough, which could also help him finish stronger.