My heart is bleeding

Marcos Giron and I, it was a love story, but the American is losing himself right now and I'm not optimistic about this upcoming match.

The American is in free fall right now with awful losses and very labored wins against much weaker players. I don’t know what’s going on with him, but it just looks like his tennis is worse than usual in every area, and he’s lost so much confidence that it’s impacting his game even more. It’s leading to frustrating but completely deserved losses against much lower-ranked players, and now he’ll be facing an in-form opponent who, at the time I’m writing this, still has another match to play in Winston-Salem. Can the magic of the US Open rekindle the fire in Giron?

Buse was also in free fall, but he’s getting some spark back in Winston-Salem with a relatively good tournament. I still have to admit it’s not perfect, far from it. He has some huge lapses and doesn’t really show a killer instinct, but you can feel that he’s enjoying being on court again, that physically he’s solid again, and little by little his tennis is becoming dangerous again. The back-to-back matches will obviously need to be monitored, but when you see how extreme things were in Hamburg and then Roland-Garros, and the fact that he managed to hang in there against Rublev before cracking, I’m really not worried at all. He’s played less recently, especially in this last tournament where the matches haven’t been very long, and I think he’s absolutely capable of playing a five-setter here; he’s a very strong-minded player who’ll still have plenty in the tank.

The upcoming match-up is quite clear: Buse is a counterpuncher, playing rather far behind the baseline, and he’s hard to rush. I have to admit that on paper, I don’t mind this for Giron, because he hits very flat and he knows how to come forward to finish at the net; that’s a pattern he’s going to have to use and abuse against Buse, otherwise he’ll get lost in baseline exchanges. The Peruvian does tend to give up the initiative a bit too much at times, and in that kind of scenario he’s likely to drop a set, because even if Giron isn’t playing well right now, he’s going to fight in this very special tournament.