The final week of the ATP Tour season for 2019 kicks off on Sunday at London’s O2 Arena, with two matches from Group Bjorn Borg at the Tour Finals.
I talked about the lack of underdog winners at this tournament in my outright preview, with only 20 of the last 104 betting underdogs winning at this event in the last seven years and both favourites look pretty solid on Sunday.
Novak Djokovic is 22-5 win/loss in the round robin stage of the Tour Finals in London in his career and he’s never lost his opening match here yet in a 9-0 record.
In recent years the Serb hasn’t been hanging about in his opening matches at the O2, winning by at least a four game margin (and often by much more) each year since Tomas Berdych pushed him to a final set tie break back in 2011.
And given how nervous Matteo Berrettini is likely to be on debut at the O2 this year and the fine form that Djokovic showed in Bercy a couple of weeks ago I’m not keen on the Italian’s chances here.
Berrettini has looked a nervy sort in big matches before and the stats of his three matches against the elite players in my database (Djokovic, Nadal, Murray, Federer) show he’s only broken serve 5.1% of the time in those matches.
And one of those was against the returning from injury Andy Murray in Beijing recently, so the Italian has a lot to prove just yet against the very best players in the world.
Even if we look at Berrettini against the players I have in my database as ‘top-10 quality’ we find that he’s 2-7 win/loss and has broken serve only 9.8% of the time (holding 78.1% of the time), so this looks like a bit of a baptism of fire for Berrettini at the Tour Finals.
On his side is the fact that it’s a first career clash with Djokovic, so it may take the latter a bit of time to start to read the Berrettini serve, but once Djokovic does that it’s likely to be the Serb proving far too strong from the back of the court.
Djokovic beat John Isner 6-4, 6-3 in his opening match here last year and bagelled Dominic Thiem the time before, plus he dished out double breadsticks to Kei Nishikori and Marin Cilic in 2014 and 2015’s opening matches at the O2.
He’d faced that latter pair numerous times before though and it might take slightly longer for Djokovic to break through (unless Berrettini starts very nervously) but under 19.5 games at 2.38 looks the bet here.
The evening match between Roger Federer and Dominic Thiem looks a little harder to call, with the Austrian having beaten Federer in four of their last five meetings.
The only one of those five matches to have been played on indoor hard though went the way of Federer and it was here last year in a match that was arguably one of the worst – if not the worst – of Thiem’s main level career.
Thiem tried to be much more aggressive than he’s used to in that match and he could barely keep the ball in the court, racking up 34 unforced errors in 17 games.
I’d expect a lot better from Thiem this time around, given his recent better level on hard courts, but it’s still a tough ask for his style of play against someone who plays as aggressively and as quickly as Federer on indoor hard.
Thiem has often looked pretty jaded in this very late stage of the season and that was the case last week in Bercy when he was easily beaten by Grigor Dimitrov, so I’d be a little concerned by his fitness after a tough Asian swing and a home win in Vienna lately if I were betting in this one.
A feature of Thiem’s improvement lately has been his serving on hard courts, which has seen him hold serve 86.8% of the time in his last 10 main level matches.
That’s only one percent fewer holds than Federer in the Swiss’s last 10 main level matches and their points won on first serve is exactly the same at just short of 77%.
So, I’m expecting a closer match than the one here a year ago and if we look at Federer’s opening matches at the O2 in recent years we find that he’s played a tie break in four of his last five.
Given the impressive serving numbers of the pair of them lately a tie break seems very possible again, but odds of 2.08 about that occurrence at an event that’s seen only 35% of its matches in the last seven years feature one doesn’t appeal.
Instead I’ll just take Djokovic to ease past Berrettini on day one.
Best Bet
0.5 points win under 19.5 games in Djokovic/Berrettini at 2.38
