We didn’t get any luck at the O2 on Monday when the opening set of Daniil Medvedev and Stefanos Tsitsipas went to a tie break, but mathematically no tie breaks was a decent bet in that one in terms of value.
Another irony in that one is that only twice in 2019 has Medvedev failed to create a break point chance in one of his matches – and we were on him both times.
The first one was when we had him outright in Washington DC (about the only event he didn’t win this summer) and he lost in the final in two breakers to Nick Kyrgios and now at the O2 where he’s not in a great position to win the group.
I said in my preview that the atmosphere and circumstances on this match at this venue may favour Tsitsipas and Medvedev certainly looked rather tight out there and not at all at ease.
Moving on to Tuesday and Roger Federer has a quick and seemingly good opportunity to get his Tour Finals campaign back on track on Tuesday when he faces Matteo Berrettini, who he steamrollered at Wimbledon back in the summer.
Berrettini was coming off a superb grass swing up until then, with a title in Stuttgart (without dropping a set) and a semi final in Halle, but he only won five games in three sets against Federer.
Much of that was probably to do with his first time facing a legend of the game on Centre Court at Wimbledon in a really nervy display and perhaps his opening day experience against Novak Djokovic here at the O2 will have helped him.
It can’t be easy playing your first ever match in this environment and as I said before that one Berrettini does strike me as a nervy sort and he didn’t show what he can do against an opponent that never really allowed him to settle.
Federer needs to improve on a slightly rusty display in his opening match against Dominic Thiem and he should be too much for Berrettini’s movement to cope with on a fair paced indoor hard court.
Clearly, Berrettini has much to prove against the elite players, with his record now reading 0-4 win/loss and no sets won and breaking serve less than 10% of the time and he’ll need a below par showing from Federer again here.
Fed has now lost four of his last six matches at this tournament, but last year he bounced back from losing his opening match as a 1.29 chance to Kei Nishikori to ease past Thiem and Kevin Anderson to make the semi finals.
Indeed, Federer has never lost his second round robin match at the Tour Finals at the O2, so it’s pretty likely that he’ll realise what didn’t work so well against Thiem and step it up for Tuesday.
He had a fair idea of what went wrong against Thiem, saying: “Just maybe that first-round hiccups a little bit, not hitting your spots on the serve when you need to, getting into trouble early in the service games, which maybe doesn't happen later on in the tournament.”
In Federer’s nine second round robin matches at the O2 he’s won seven of them by at least a five game margin and the other two were by three and four game margins, so given how weak the return game of Berrettini is against the world’s best players it may pay to take Fed on the handicap.
The Swiss is usually a quick starter in his matches, so it was a surprise to see him broken right away on Sunday, but it’s hard to see that happening again and while Federer -3.5 games is too short for me at 1.56, the set one score appeals.
Fed is often the master of the one-break set win and 6-3 or 6-4 to him in set one at around 5.0 each looks the call here. There’s obviously an element of luck as to whether or not he serves first in that bet though.
The evening match at (not before) 20:00 UK time sees Novak Djokovic take on Dominic Thiem for the 10th time and similarly to the Federer match-up for Thiem it’s the Austrian who’s had the better of his series lately.
Much of the fact that Thiem has won three of their last four is down to the matches being played on clay though and it’ll be interesting to see how this new, improved Thiem on hard courts fares in quicker conditions against the Serb.
That win over an admittedly off-colour Federer will have done Thiem the world of good in terms of his confidence at a venue he’s struggled at in the past and he’ll be relishing this opportunity now, if he wasn’t before.
Looking back at Thiem’s stats of 12 months ago he was on a hold/break total of 101 on indoor hard in his main level career and in his last three months at main level on hard courts he’s up at 107.8.
Still not good enough to beat Djokovic you wouldn’t have thought, but he has broken the Serb 31.1% of the time on clay in their last three matches and held his own serve 80% of the time.
If he transfers that to hard courts then we may well have a match here and of course Djokovic will be highly motivated now that Rafael Nadal has lost a match and the race for year-end number one is very much on.
Thiem, though, can qualify for the semis today if he beats Djokovic and Federer beats Berrettini, so we might get a competitive encounter here.
Thiem took the opening set off Djokovic here way back in 2016 and the bets for me here look to be either the over games or Thiem to win a set or Djokovic to win it 2-1 at 3.90 and that’s my slight preference.
Best Bet
0.5 points win Djokovic to beat Thiem 2-1 at 3.90
