A logic that’s been followed?

Bonzi is arriving in good shape and Molcan is arriving injured, without any matches on hard courts.

Ab injury for Molcan, who hasn’t played for a few weeks and comes in with no rhythm at all and no hard-court matches, period. It’s not a great surface for him or his game, but he’s already had some good results on it because he’s still a smart player and hard to handle with his defensive skills and lefty touch. He’s often injured and I think that was also the case at Wimbledon before he still played a good match anyway. Hard to trust him even though I really like the match-up for Bonzi.

The Frenchman is coming off a good tournament in Winston-Salem, but we saw in the semi that a good defender/counterpuncher was a nightmare for him; he couldn’t get easy attacking balls to follow into the net. I even found him really lazy and not very motivated all week in the end. He’s not the most expressive player in the world, but I’ve seen him dig deep to go after wins, and that wasn’t really the case this week. We’ll see if I’m imagining things or if there’s something deeper. In any case, we’ll be watching the match-up closely because Molcan could blow him up from the baseline and stop him from having fun in attack. That said, I think a Buse is more annoying to face because the level is higher, and we had a slightly higher bounce in WS, whereas it’ll be lower at the US.

Bonzi has found his way back to winning and this is a big R1 within his reach. He has to seize his chance.