I think can be forgiven for thinking that the tennis gods haven’t really been on my side this season, after yet another big-priced outright fell at the final hurdle on Saturday in Shanghai.
My 90-1 shot, Matteo Berrettini, was blitzed by a serving onslaught early on from Alexander Zverev in their semi final and my record now in deciding matches in 2019 worsens to a shocking 3-11 win/loss (I’d forgotten about Andrey Rublev winning his semi final in Hamburg as an each-way, yesterday).
No complaints about the manner of the loss in this one, with Zverev making 81% of his first serves at around the 135mph mark, which would have been a tough challenge for even the best returner.
We didn’t even get the tie break in set one either, as Berrettini didn’t serve anywhere near as well as he had been earlier in the week, with only 52% of his first serves in – almost 30% fewer than Zverev made – and that’s a huge disparity.
So, once again the Shanghai title will go to one of the top six seeds, with number three Daniil Medvedev and number five Alexander Zverev facing off for the fifth time in their careers.
It’s unusual to see the player with a 4-0 career series lead starting as a 2.43 underdog, but the level of Medvedev has been so strong these past few months (apart from when he lost for us in the Washington DC final as favourite, but I’m not bitter about that of course) that he has to start odds-on here.
The Russian has won 28 of his last 31 matches at main level over the last three months and in so doing he’s chalked up 87.6% holds of serve and 30.4% breaks of serve (and won 12 of his 14 tie breaks) for a combined total of 118.
That’s almost as good as it gets over a period of that many matches and while Zverev can’t compete with that given his struggles for much of the 2019 season he has got almost exactly the same set of stats in his career series against Medvedev.
Zverev has held serve 88.4% of the time and broken Medvedev 30.2% of the time for a combined total of 118.6, while Medvedev in those four losses to Zverev has held serve 69.8% of the time and broken just 11.6% of the time.
So, it’s been very much a career series that Zverev has dominated until now, but the obvious issue with taking those numbers on face value is that those matches were played in 2016/17/18 when Medvedev was ranked no higher than number 50.
And while that latter fact makes the career series a tad obsolete it will still surely be on Medvedev’s mind a little, as will the impression that Zverev now seems to be coming back to his best form.
What’ll be pleasing – or should be pleasing – for Zverev, other than his serve firing and his forehand hitting through the ball again, is that he’s winning more than 50% of his second serve points again.
He went a long time winning between 30 and 40% of his second serve points this season and this week in Shanghai he’s up at 53.5%, which is better than the 52.7% of Medvedev, so that’s a good sign for the German.
Indeed, there isn’t much in it this week in terms of each man’s service hold/break numbers, with Medvedev slightly better at 115.9 to the 114.8 of Zverev and a tight match does seem likely here.
Zverev has produced 1.39 aces per game this week and made 74.4% of his first serves, winning 81.1% of those, so it’s easy to feel that this one will be close.
I’d still give a very slight edge to Medvedev though on his form of the last few months and probably a fraction higher confidence that cokes with all those match wins and 2-1 to the Russian at 3.85 looks worthy of a small interest.
Best Bet
0.5 points win Medvedev to beat Zverev 2-1 at 3.85
