Snatch victory and a smile

The odds of seeing one of the two players give away the end of the match seem extremely low to me.

I’ll start with Cerundolo, who’s been doing a bit better results-wise lately, but I’m not convinced he’s really back to a good level. He had a nice US Open on paper to get him going again, but the actual content of his matches was pretty bad overall. There was a comeback against Fritz that kind of saves the whole run, but apart from that, the rest was awful. After that, he beat two very weak players in the Davis Cup and lost to Ruud at the Laver Cup while playing particularly badly. There’s also been a lot of travel between the Davis Cup, the Laver Cup and now the Asian swing. I can’t help thinking about what he said at the end of the US swing about lacking motivation and wanting to go home. I think the Davis Cup and the Laver Cup did him some good, but now that he has to go back into battle far from home, I’m pretty pessimistic about the end of his season.

I’m not going to jump to conclusions about VDZ, because he’s a specialist at disappointing, but he has been showing a consistent and very good level for several weeks now. There was a Davis Cup match at home, but let’s say that was part of the same run. He already managed to play Chengdu last week and unfortunately ran into a red-hot Basilashvili. This week, he came through qualifying and just beat Royer in the first round, which is already a very good match. Then he beat a local player I don’t know, but who had beaten Altmaier. That’s pretty much in line with what we’ve seen from VDZ in recent weeks. And I think the end of his season could be very interesting, with indoor events coming up and tournaments that seem quite nice for his game. I’d say that given form and level, I put him a bit ahead. But what about the match-up?

It’s 4–1 for Cerundolo, but I think this is a match-up that depends mainly on desire and form, more than on the match-up itself, because I don’t think Cerundolo’s profile is particularly troublesome for VDZ. I’d even say that if VDZ manages to defend well and counter intelligently, then he has everything he needs to make Cerundolo implode and force him into overhitting on serve or on the forehand.