We found a pretty comfortable underdog winner on Wednesday in Rio when my headline pick Pedro Martinez Portero eased past Pablo Andujar in straight sets to provide a 2.45 success.
That was about as good as it got though, with Pierre-Hugues Herbert producing a wonderful serving display to sneak past Mikhail Kukushkin in two tight sets and Cam Norrie was terrible against Brandon Nakashima to foil our 50-1 outright punt after Norrie had beaten Taylor Fritz.
In Rio the key to this whole week looks to lie in the fitness or otherwise of Dominic Thiem, who hurt his left knee in his opening round match on Tuesday.
“I was really worried because I never felt a pain like that in my life,” Thiem said. “I hit a door here when I arrived but I didn’t make much of it because I didn’t feel anything during my warm up.”
Thiem’s beaten his opponent on Thursday, Jaume Munar, in a similar way (tight first set followed by a breadstick) in both of their prior career clashes (both in Barcelona on the clay) and under normal circumstances the Austrian should prove too powerful, but who knows how fit Thiem is now.
It’ll be another brutally hot day in Rio, where it’s set to be 30C and 80% humidity even at 22:00 local time, so Thiem might struggle, but it’s guesswork really and I’m not sweet of too many of the underdogs in Rio today.
Thiago Seyboth Wild has some weapons and might well cause Borna Coric some problems, while Gianluca Mager, who we backed the other day against Casper Ruud, is perhaps a bit short in price against Joao Dominguez because of that Ruud win.
I’d expect Dusan Lajovic to get past Lorenzo Sonego, but the one I liked today was in Delray Beach, however the price have moved overnight and now Tommy Paul is favourite against Frances Tiafoe.
I’m not backing him now at 1.86, but I’d take evens if I could get it about Paul, whose stats are much better in the last year than Tiafoe, whose level has dropped off a cliff lately.
If we go on the last 10 outdoor hard court matches each at main level (the main draw of a main tour event) we see that Paul is 7-3 win/loss and with a service hold/break total of 105.3, while Tiafoe is 3-7 and 92.9.
It’s hard to go back much further with Paul because of his injury lay off, but in the last 12 months in all matches (includes qualies) of main tour outdoor hard events he’s 14-6 win/loss and with a hold/break total of 105.1, with Tiafoe 10-14 and 95.8.
You could probably argue that Tiafoe has played tougher matches in that time, but Tiafoe has shown little for some time now and was probably priced as favourite because of his name, former title here and very old head-to-head of 2-0.
Now that the prices have moved I’ll pass, but Paul would have been a nice underdog option.
We backed Miomir Kecmanovic as underdog last week in New York against Ugo Humbert and he snaked through in a decider, but now the layers have wised up and made him favourite for this quick rematch in similarly slow conditions, but with wind thrown into the equation.
So, no value on Kecmanovic this time, but maybe Jack Sock might do something (if he can muster up the effort) against his mate Steve Johnson.
I’m not going to back Sock, but it wouldn’t shock me if he felt like having a good go against a player he knows very well.
So, the bet today is to chance a set one tie break between Pierre-Hugues Herbert and Felix Auger-Aliassime, who played out a tough serving battle in Montpellier a few weeks ago.
That day the pair won 88% and 87% of first serve points respectively and there was only one break of serve in the match from just three opportunities and as I said ahead of the Kukushkin match, Herbert really struggles to break serve indoors.
And FAA has played 0.32 tie breaks per set and held 88% of the time in his eight indoor matches this season, and has played a set one breaker in four of his last eight indoor matches.
Herbert has held 93.4% of the time in his four indoor matches in 2020 and played 0.38 tie breaks per set, with three of his last four victories at main level on indoor hard featuring an opening set tie break.
Auger-Aliassime talked about the difficulty he’s had against Herbert (as I mentioned in the preview of their Montpellier clash that he’d struggled with net rushers):
“It will be hard. He has an aggressive game; he rushes you and at the same time holds the baseline… he has a very beautiful volley, that's for sure. He has a very fluid game. He uses the change of pace a lot. Against him, these are not boring matches to play! He poses a lot of challenges to solve.”
Hopefully he won’t solve them until the 13th game of the opening set, if at all, but as I said the other day FAA is surely fatigued after a lot of tough tennis lately and we’ll see how he gets on.
Elsewhere in Marseille Jannik Sinner could prove to be another tough opening round opponent for Daniil Medvedev, who’ll need to be on it from the get go against the aggressive style of Sinner.
It’ll be a great one to watch, but that’s all for me, with my interest drawn to our only remaining outright, the 50-1 Aljaz Bedene, who faces Gilles Simon, who Bedene beat twice last season indoors.
In those two matches Bedene held serve 95.7% of the time against a good returner in Simon and won 86.2% on his first ball, firing 1.4 aces per game, so if he stays in that form on serve he should win again.
Marin Cilic has a suspect left knee, so his match against Denis Shapovalov is overlooked, while David Goffin may well be challenged by the improving Egor Gerasimov.
But just one bet for me today in the Herbert/Felix match.
Best Bet
0.5 points win over 12.5 games in set one of Herbert/Auger-Aliassime at 3.25
