Challenger Sao Paulo – Quarter Final – Germain Gigounon vs Guido Andreozzi.
There’s plenty of ATP and WTA action in this week’s five tournaments, but not a whole lot that I’m sold on from a pre-match handicap betting perspective.
Philipp Kohlschreiber (against David Goffin) looks the best of a bad bunch, and perhaps Lukas Rosol can test the clay-hating Andy Murray in Munich, so I’m dropping down to the Challenger Tour for today’s recommendation.
Two matches in Sao Paulo catch my eye, with Gonzalo Lama and Guido Andreozzi looking like decent prospects against Christian Lindell and Germain Gigounon respectively.
Eventually I plumped with Andreozzi, who should be able to take care of Gigounon for several reasons.
The initial statistics favour the man from Argentina, who has held 72.6% in clay challengers in the last 12 months, compared to Gigounon’s 68.0%. In addition to this, Andreozzi is stronger on return, breaking a superb 34.2%, a full 10% higher than Gigounon’s 24.2%.
Overall, this indicates that Andreozzi is a very solid player on clay at Challenger level, whilst Gigounon has some work to do to get to a similar level. The stats led to a model price of 1.38, much shorter than the currently available 1.74.
Furthermore, Gigounon is no doubt tired after a run to the final in Santos last week, where his defeat in the final to Blaz Rola was his third three setter in five matches. The Belgian also needed a decider to account for Maximo Gonzalez in the first round here, so has played 18 sets of tennis in 10 days.
My research shows that low-ranked players suffer much bigger effects of playing many matches in a short period of time, with lower fitness levels often being part of the reason why they are ranked so low.
All things considered, taking on Gigounon looks a very appealing prospect, and with Andreozzi winning his last 6 wins with a starting price of 1.50-1.99 on clay in straight sets (a run going back to October 2013), backing him to win in straight sets again today seems the best route on the match handicap.
Recommendation: Back Guido Andreozzi -1.5 sets at 2.75
Price correct at the time of writing.
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