The world’s best have dragged themselves once again to the O2 Arena in London’s Docklands for the penultimate time before the event moves to Turin in 2021 for the traditional end to the ATP season.
And while this event is one of the worst of the entire season in terms of underdog winners in the match odds markets (81% of the favourites have won here in the last seven years), we have had success here.
We made a slight profit last year and in 2017 we had a 12-1 winner with Grigor Dimitrov and bagged eight winners from nine (worst price 1.98) so it’s not impossible to have a good week at the 02 as a bettor.
The conditions at the O2 tend to vary year-on-year and also change depending on how hot it gets inside the arena, as several players have noted about here and about Paris-Bercy.
They tend to find that it gets a lot quicker when the place is full of body heat from the crowd than it is during practice and we’ll have to wait and see what the organisers have come up in terms of court pace.
It was clocked as slow as 34.7 CPI at the start of 2018’s tournament, compared to 42 in 2016 and 2017.
Novak Djokovic hasn’t won the title here since 2015, but he’ll probably need to if he wants to end the season with the number one ranking, however, Rafa Nadal may well not be fit fir duty after incurring an injury in Paris.
Nadal was diagnosed with “a small bloating in my right abdominal rectum,” and he doesn’t sound as if 2019 will be the year when he wins his first Tour Finals title.
“[I’m] taking it day by day after Paris,” he said. “I need to see how things go, started serving yesterday [Thursday], very slowly. Right now the main goal is to be ready on Monday following the protocols that the doctor gave me.”
Given Nadal’s record, both here at the O2, where he’s made only one final in his career, and in Bercy, where he’s also made just the one title match, I’m happy to take on an injured Rafa this week.
And the obvious choice, really, is to back the form player of the second half of this season to win Group Andre Agassi, and that, of course, is Daniil Medvedev.
The young Russian made a wide choice in skipping his home even in Moscow after a crazy summer to autumn schedule and even then he looked jaded in Bercy, where he lost a poor one to Jeremy Chardy.
But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was saving the last of his energies for this debut year at the O2 and perhaps only nerves can stop him from at least making it out of the group and quite possibly winning it.
Medvedev has much in his favour this week, with a perfect 5-0 head-to-head series lead over Stefanos Tsitsipas to call on and a convincing win over Alexander Zverev as recently as a month ago in Shanghai, too.
And with Nadal seemingly struggling Medvedev won’t fear the Spaniard in these conditions and more so having pushed Nadal mighty close in the US Open final in September.
In these conditions and circumstances I’d probably have Medvedev, who boasts a 22-3 record and a hold/break total of 114.5 in his last three months at main level, as favourite to win the group.
Zverev’s confidence still appears not to have returned to its former levels on the evidence of his performances in the Shanghai final and in Basel and Bercy, where he went back to pushing at the ball after a decent Asian swing.
He’s also lost his last three against Tsitsipas, so the signs don’t appear to be good this year for our defending Tour Finals champion.
Tsitsipas isn’t short on self-belief, but he is a bit light on current form, with both Djokovic and Federer comfortably getting the better of him within the last few weeks on indoor hard.
He said he was making some tweaks to his game in Basel and it hasn’t paid off yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he relished this big stage and came out with a performance or two.
Group Bjorn Borg features two players in Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer, who’ve won 11 Tour Finals titles between them, but Federer’s last one was way back in 2011 and he hasn’t made the final since 2015.
The problem with taking either or both of the superstar pair on in this group this week is the quality of the opposition looks questionable, with Matteo Berrettini surely likely to be very nervous on debut.
And Dominic Thiem has struggled badly at this event over the year, with several utterly woeful displays at this tournament in the last few years (he’s not on his own there by any means).
He said of his loss to Federer here last year: “An extremely large number of mistakes that were not just flimsy errors, but missed by a mile, so it was just very, very weak.”
I’d expect better form him this time around after improvements in his hard court game lately saw him win Beijing and Vienna, but at what cost physically?
He looked very tired in Bercy and we’ll see what he’s got left in the tank, but it looks a big ask for Thiem to make it to the semis ahead of Federer or Djokovic if both of the big guns are fit (never a given at this stage of the season).
Thiem and Berrettini have played out a couple of tight ones in the past month, with the Italian edging put the Austrian (same number of points won overall) in Shanghai in quick conditions and Thiem taking it on a slower surface in Vienna by six points overall.
In the really big matches that Berrettini has played so far he’s looked really nervous – against Federer at Wimbledon and Monfils and Nadal in New York – and I’m not sure the belief is there yet at this highest of levels.
Unless injury or illness plays a part it’s tough to see anything other than Federer and Djokovic progressing to the semis in this group.
So, I’ll just have a couple of points on Medvedev at 2.75 to win Group Andre Agassi as my outright interest at the O2 this year.
Best Bet
2 points win Medvedev to win Group Andre Agassi at 2.75
