There’s round two action from Sofia, Montpellier and Cordoba on the ATP World Tour on Thursday and Sean Calvert is back to find the best value bets on day four.
Wednesday was another good day for our bets, if a slightly frustrating one, when Radu Albot (as is so often the case with these +1.5 sets bets) didn’t need any sort of a handicap to beat Philipp Kohlschreiber in Montpellier.
Round two completes on Thursday and there are a couple of underdogs I like today in Sofia.
Jan-Lennard Struff vs Stefanos Tsitsipas
This final match of the day in Sofia looks like one where we may see an upset or at least a competitive encounter, with Struff often at his best on indoor hard and possessing the weapons to make this a tough opener for Tsitsipas.
Struff has beaten the likes of Marin Cilic, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Stan Wawrinka indoors and Tomas Berdych and Kevin Anderson on outdoor hard in recent times and his stats show that he’s a dangerous foe indoors.
The big German has held serve 88.7% of the time in his dozen main level indoor hard matches and broken 15.7% of the time (104.4 total) and that’s close to the numbers of Tsitsipas, whose stats are a little skewed by numbers from the Next Gen tournament.
Looking at what Tsitsipas did at ‘regular level’ events indoors in 2018 he did struggle at times, losing in his opening match in Montpellier, Marseille and Metz and only winning his first match of that season indoors in Tokyo in October.
Even if we include the Milan Next Gen event in Tsitsipas’ stats he still only leads Struff by less than 2% in their hold/break totals and they’ve won the same amount of points on first serve (68%), with 2.8% between them in favour of Tsitsipas on return points won.
Against the big servers in my database Tsitsipas has a 4-6 win/loss record and he’s played at least one tie break in nine of those 10 matches.
That relative weakness on return of serve, combined with a possible denting of the Tsitsipas confidence after a comprehensive loss to Rafael Nadal in Melbourne and Struff’s strong serving (and one match in Sofia already this week) give the German an opportunity here for me.
The Greek doesn’t sound like he’s particularly in the right shape at the moment either: “To be honest, I didn’t have many days to rest after the long run at the Australian Open, so I had a couple of days off and then I had to come back to the Academy I am practicing,” he said in his interview in Sofia. “To be honest and sincere with you, I am not 100% recovered from the last tournament.”
The other one that I think might be interesting in Sofia is the 14:00 approx. encounter between Robin Haase and Daniil Medvedev in which the latter looks rather short given that he’s struggled against Haase in their three career meetings so far.
Like Struff, Haase has one match under his belt in Sofia already this week, and the Dutchman can cause the tall Medvedev problems with his low slice on this court.
In their three prior meetings Haase won one (on clay) and went lost two deciders on grass, so it’s not been a simple match-up for Medvedev and this looks far from a cosy opening match of the tournament for the Russian.
Looking at the stats from those three clashes (although none were on indoor hard) we see that Medvedev has only won 44% of his second serve points against Haase and there’s only 2.4% in it in holds of serve.
Having won three matches (even though they were against low-ranked opposition) Haase’s often-brittle confidence should be on the up and odds-against on Haase winning a set at 2.08 looks the wager.
Elsewhere, Pierre-Hugues Herbert impressed in his opener in Montpellier, but 1.38 still looks short against Ilya Ivashka, who’s won two of his three career matches against net-rushing types Stakhovsky and Mahut.
Fernando Verdasco is 4-9 against the big servers in my database on indoor hard, but Marius Copil’s suspect backhand makes him a bit of a question mark against a good lefty.
Copil’s 1-3 in his career so far against top-50 ranked lefties, but he plays well here in Sofia and lot will depend on how well the Romanian serves today and subsequently how well he can keep Verdasco away from attacking that backhand.
Another one that looks a tad short is Marton Fucsovics, who lost to Yannick Maden the last time they met in the Hungarian’s backyard in Budapest last season on a clay surface that was probably too slow for Fucsovics.
I talked up Maden’s chances against Adrian Mannarino the other day and he’s not without a fair chance here, with Fucsovics often lacking a ‘plan B’ if his attacking game isn’t working.
A classic example of that came when Fucsovics fell apart against Radu Albot indoors in Metz last autumn and the Hungarian will need his best stuff to justify this price.
Best Bets
0.5 points win Struff to beat Tsitsipas at 2.90
0.5 points win Haase +1.5 sets to beat Medvedev at 2.08
