It was a mixed day for us on Wednesday, with two of our big-priced outrights for the week (Rublev and Popyrin) progressing to the quarter finals (one still to play at the time of writing, but Soon-Woo Kwon was beaten by Cam Norrie.
We’ve got four matches on the card again in Atlanta on Thursday, with similar weather expected, in the region of 28C heat and between 35 and 40% humidity, which is not as bad as it can be here by any means.
Alex De Minaur vs Bradley Klahn
Klahn has been in decent form lately, winning the Winnetka Challenger without dropping a set a few weeks ago on hard courts, but he’s unlikely to be up to the job of taking down De Minaur.
Klahn is 8-21 win/loss at main level on outdoor hard and he doesn’t create or take enough chances on return of serve at the higher level, breaking only 12.3% of the time in those 29 matches.
De Minaur’s return game is vastly superior, with the Aussie breaking serve twice as often as Klahn (24.4%) in his last 32 main level hard court matches (22-10 win/loss).
This pair clashed on the worst surface for both of them – clay – at the French Open recently and De Minaur won that at a canter and while that’s not much of a barometer for this match I’d expect De Minaur to be able to neutralise the Klahn serve well enough for a comfortable win.
Klahn will need to raise his level from what we tend to see from him against better opposition to really push De Minaur, as he’s 3-20 versus top-50 ranked opposition (2018 wins over Kyrgios, Marterer and Jurgen Melzer back in 2012).
Perhaps the only thing in Klahn’s favour here is the fact that he’s played several matches on hard courts after the switch from grass, but it’s not as if De Minaur is coming straight from Newport with just a day or two to prepare.
De Minaur has won six of his last seven main level matches on outdoor hard when priced as a 1.40 to 1.59 favourite and the one he did lose was 10-8 in a final set breaker.
The 2-0 or -3.5 games on De Minaur at 2.06 look the bets of interest here.
Ugo Humbert and Miomir Kecmanovic clashed only a few weeks back on the grass of Antalya and it was the former that was a deserved winner that day.
Kecmanovic preyed on the Humbert backhand often that day and the lower bouncing surface didn’t really help Humbert, who would probably prefer it to bounce a bit higher and more consistently, which is what he’ll get on these hard courts.
Kecmanovic is playing some good ball at the moment and was rather unlucky to be injured at Wimbledon against Benoit Paire and his main level stats on outdoor hard so far in his career are a fair bit better than those of Humbert.
They’re based on only nine (Humbert) and 10 (Kecmanovic) matches respectively, but Kecmanovic is 6-4 win/loss and with a handy hold/break total of 106.8, while Humbert is 3-6 and on 100.1.
The standout number for Kecmanovic is that he wins 60% of his second serve points at the moment on outdoor hard at main level, while Humbert doesn’t break serve enough yet at only 14.1%.
It’s hard to take too much from such limited numbers, but it shows that perhaps Kecmanovic is just that bit further forward than Humbert in his development at this level right now.
Kecmanovic as slight favourite looks about the right pricing to me here.
Only the very brave would bet on a match involving Matthew Ebden and Bernard Tomic, both of whom have a tendency of jacking it all in if they don’t fancy it – Tomic more so than Ebden, but the latter has certainly had his moments.
Some of Ebden’s efforts lately have been seriously lacking in intensity, but he’s facing the king of slackers this time in Tomic, although Bernie did put the work in here in round one against Frances Tiafoe.
I said the other day that I’m waiting for Bernie to pop up and win a 250 just to show us all that he can and maybe he’ll fancy it this week after actually toughing out a win, as he did against Tiafoe in a final set breaker.
There again he might decide that’s enough for the week already, but he has won all three career meetings with Ebden, who said recently that he didn’t want to win last year’s Atlanta semi final because he didn’t want to play again the next day.
That’s what we’re dealing with here and I think I’ll pass.
Kevin King was the latest beneficiary Grigor Dimitrov’s inability to find anything like his old level and fans of the Bulgarian must be seriously concerned about the prospects their man after his latest display.
Perhaps the shoulder is stopping Dimitrov from being able to produce his old level, but he looked fine at the French Open in a cracking match against Stan Wawrinka, yet nothing since.
So, King got a bit lucky (again, after a retirement from Ryan Harrison in qualies) really and it’s hard to see him beating Taylor Fritz, whose form is in stark contrast to that of Dimitrov, having won his first main level title during the grass swing.
Fritz should be winning this, but he did only just edge past King when the pair met very early on in the 2018 season at the Noumea Challenger when King won one more point but lost the match.
Maybe King will ride the wave and give Fritz something to think about, but it’s tough to see King winning.
Best Bet
0.5 points win De Minaur -3.5 games to beat Klahn at 2.06
