End of the road?

Atmane has been amazing so far, but a massive challenge awaits...

Huge fan of Atmane's matches on hardcourts here in North America, similar to last year. Coming in with a lot of points to defend here in Cincinnati, he played a fantastic match against Etcheverry, who was playing well himself, despite losing in straight sets. Terence is just doing everything so well. We've seen him steal some points with crazy defending; he has pretty good rally tolerance, playing very aggressively without making a lot of unforced errors. I felt the same about him in Montreal, after his wins against Draper and Khachanov. Well, unfortunately, he ran into Mensik, who was an incredibly tough matchup for him... and now I fear that he will meet the same fate against Zverev. Both Jakub and Sasha are outstanding servers and are excellent at counterpunching from the baseline. Atmane was not even playing badly at all against Mensik, but his shots just came back with a bit of extra interest, over and over. Zverev also had a somewhat lengthy match against Norrie yesterday, so he should have played himself a bit more into form as well. If Atmane can reach the level he had here last year, there is perhaps a glimmer of hope. He had an incredibly tough draw, and he was able to stand up to players such as Cobolli, Fonseca, Fritz, Rune and even Sinner up to a tiebreak in the first set...