Smile a little!

VDZ is going through a good spell, but it takes more than that to wrest a smile from him. Off the top of my head, I knew his record in this tournament was good, but I didn’t think it was *that* good.

It’s been a while, but VDZ has already reached a quarter-final here. Last year, he played a very good match against Rune and he also beat Alcaraz in 2024, as we remember. It’s a tournament that seems to suit him. When you look at the level he’s shown during this US swing, you can tell he could be one of the potential surprise packages. His Winston-Salem tournament was decent, even if he had two relatively easy first rounds. Then he lost to a really strong and inspired player, who managed to handle the Dutchman’s game well. Overall it’s still quite positive, and I think we’ll get another good version of VDZ. But as usual, you have to be wary of his early rounds. The advantage is that the format is long, which means that even a bad version of VDZ should have time to wake up.

For this first round, he’ll be up against Choinski, the Brit with a pretty atypical style, who plays well on hard but can’t seem to win. He’s still a clay-court player who prefers the red dirt and is missing that little something on hard. I saw him being very average against Rottgering in Winston-Salem; he served poorly and got frustrated, he just didn’t know what to do. Before this hard-court swing, he had some good wins on the Challenger tour and had built up quite a bit of confidence, which he’s now losing little by little. He’s still a fairly reliable player over long matches, he’s in good physical shape and can play high-level sets. Logically, you’d expect him to fight hard once again, but in the end to lose.

The match-up looks good to me for VDZ, who will be able to make him crack from the baseline, playing on the counter, and who seems to have given him a proper beating last year when they faced each other. That said, we know the Dutchman and his consistency issues: if we see him start hitting double faults and not showing the same level as recently, we’re out.