The prodigy son

Hewitt must now back it up after his big tournament in Washington.

Hewitt took advantage of a few retirements and made the most of his opportunity in Washington. Since then, he’s gone back to Futures and notably won two matches before losing to Chidekh. I don’t think the young Australian’s level of play is very high yet, and I’m putting his wins in Washington into perspective. As I said earlier, two of them came from opponents retiring. Then he beat a Giron who is completely off his game at the moment. And in the end, he’s still missing a little something, even if it was a very good start. What I mean is that once the intensity really went up, he was completely overwhelmed, which is perfectly normal. He’s still very young and his game is still lacking real foundations to last on the main tour.

Prizmic is a huge favorite in this matchup, even if the Croatian is going through a rough patch right now, with very few matches and a worrying physical condition at times. He recently had cramps in Umag at home, and we expected him to be fairly fresh for his return against Norrie, but there too he struggled physically, even though his opponent was also having issues in that area. As I said, Prizmic is a player who doesn’t really manage to push himself and hang in there when things get tough for him. I think it’s also a confidence problem; where at the start of the year he was getting through a lot of rounds and practically always had to win his qualifying matches, now he finds himself thrown straight into the deep end every time and might be missing something to really get his game flowing.

I see a bit of a similarity between Prizmic and De Minaur in the way they play. They both have incredible court coverage, play relatively flat, and hold their baseline well. Hewitt couldn’t find any solutions against ADM, and in my view, if Prizmic manages to maintain his intensity, the outcome will be the same.