Tough luck for the Americans

I think we have two home players capable of creating some great surprises this week, especially Nakashima, but unfortunately one of them is going to stop here.

I don’t need to go back over Nakashima’s XXL preparation before this tournament in detail. I think we can safely say the American is playing at a top-10 level right now. And I’m weighing my words: his serving quality is exceptional for his height. In the rest of his game, we’ve seen progress in absolutely every area. He says the change in mentality is helping him. Now he trusts his shots. He feels super strong after all the great wins he’s had recently. He just steamrolled Báez in the first round. Perfect match. Even if the opposition was relatively weak. In any case, that’s typical Nakashima. The guy is super professional and clean in his wins. A slightly tougher test is coming in this second round.

This test is called Michelsen, and the American is also relatively in form. Since Wimbledon, he’s played well but has faded a bit physically in the very last tournaments. He seemed to need a bit of a break before starting up again. He beat Cina comfortably in a match spread over two days. The first day, it wasn’t anything special. And on the second, he didn’t lose a single game. But here again, I think the opposition was too weak to draw any real conclusions from it.

Strangely enough, this will also be the first meeting between these two players. It’s quite an interesting clash of styles. We’ve seen Michelsen capable of causing Fritz problems on several occasions. So I tell myself that intrinsically, he could also manage to trouble Nakashima. Because the American is also a clean server, solid from the baseline and compact on the line. Michelsen has great ability to accelerate on both wings and break the cross-court patterns. He knows how to come to the net and will try to move Nakashima around. It’s a game style that could work, but on the other hand, I find Nakashima so solid and close to perfect at the moment that he might just be untouchable on his own service games and take advantage of a few silly errors from Michelsen on his serve when he tries to be too aggressive.