Pablo Andujar provided an easy as you like underdog winner for us on Saturday in Marrakech when he crushed Gilles Simon for the loss of only two games in their semi final.
And there was good news for those that were quick and got on my Twitter advice of Casper Ruud at 10.0 in Houston, with Ruud now roughly an even money shot to win the title there.
Sunday’s play on the ATP Tour sees a crossover of week 15’s finals and the start of the main draw of the Monte-Carlo Masters and so in total we have six matches to consider.
Monte-Carlo is usually one of the weeks I look forward to the least on the tour, as it produces very few underdog winners (26% in the last six years, making it the joint fifth-worst week of the season in that regard).
Rounds one and two, if anything, are usually worse than average, with just 24% and 22% of the underdogs winning in the first and second round respectively over the last six years.
It’s a week where I’ll be very circumspect with my bets and my stakes and then, in Roger Federer-esque fashion, I’m away the next two weeks and coming back for Madrid (though I’ll be in attendance at the Hungarian Open in Budapest, so there may be something from there).
Hubert Hurkacz vs Borna Coric
Bit of an early start for this one, at 10:00 UK time, but I think Hurkacz is perhaps the best-looking underdog of the day, with the big Pole in a very confident frame of mind at the moment.
Hurkacz has beaten Kei Nishikori (twice), Dominic Thiem (after Thiem won Indian Wells), Lucas Pouille, and Denis Shapovalov of late and he must be feeling great about his game at the moment.
He’s held serve 84% of the time and broken 18.4% of the time, which gives him a better hold/break total than Coric, and the only question here is how well the Pole will transition to the clay.
He has won 10 of his last 11 matches on clay (admittedly, they were mainly in Challengers) so there’s no reason to suppose that he can’t continue to produce good results on this surface.
Coric’s game has looked all over the place this year, with some good spells being intertwined with moments like getting bagelled by Roberto Carballes Baena on a hard court and I’ve have thought that clay would expose any frailties in his game even more, given the longer rallies.
Indeed, Coric has made only one quarter final (no further) on clay at main level in his last 11 tournaments and he has a weak record here in Monte-Carlo, where he’s on only one of his five matches (against a soon-to-be-retired Julien Benneteau).
We know that Coric struggles against the bigger servers (6-24 lifetime against the ones on my list and 2-3 on clay) so it will be interesting to see how he fares today. I certainly couldn’t back him at 1.50 given the current respective state of these two’s games.
The other option today is Matteo Berrettini, whose game suits the clay, and he may well expose Grigor Dimitrov’s lack of matches lately, but the price doesn’t appeal too much on Berrettini.
Moving on today’s finals and I wasn’t expecting Benoit Paire to beat Jo-Wilfried Tsonga yesterday – least of all from a set down and then 3-1 down in the decider – but here he is and I couldn’t count him out at all against Pablo Andujar.
This pair met in a final only two weeks ago in the Marbella Challenger and Paire should have won it, as he was a set and 5-2 up and had a match point, but in typical style he couldn’t get over the line.
I said earlier in the week that Paire has a good record against ‘baseline grinders’ and had he have won that match against Andujar in Marbella (as he clearly should have) he’d have been 4-0 lifetime now against the Spaniard.
He’s won 12 of his last 19 against Spaniards on clay and if he brings his best game and mindset to the court he could win this quite convincingly, but will he? Who knows?
In Houston, their final is a bit of a pick ‘em and while I’m obviously hoping that Casper Ruud wins it now after picking him up at that bargain price a few days ago it’s a real coin-toss, this.
Both Ruud and Christian Garin have been excellent this week and this is a repeat of the Sao Paulo semi final recently, in which Garin won it 6-4, 6-4 and Ruud was pretty poor that day.
It did seem that perhaps the nerves got the better of Ruud and they could well do again in his first final, plus he did have a problem with a neck injury on Saturday in his semi final.
“I was a bit unfortunate because I got a crack in my neck right before the match and it felt really stiff when I got on the court,” Ruud said. “In the beginning I could barely serve and the returns were hurting.”
Maybe that will be okay today, but my preference would be for Garin here, so I’ll be trading out on Ruud.
Best Bet
0.5 points win Hurkacz to beat Coric at 2.55
