Rio Open, 1st Round, Tuesday, 21/02/2023
The Rio Open is coming up this week. In the middle of the carnival season, the ATP Tour is asking the world’s tennis aces to dance. On Tuesday, Dusan Lajovic and Diego Sebastian Schwartzman will meet in the first round.
Lajovic was convincing last week in Buenos Aires. Schwartzman was knocked out of the same tournament, in which he has already reached the final three times, directly after his first match in round two.
Will he now advance in Brazil? Or will the Serb reach the next round of the 500 tournament? In my Lajovic Schwartzman tip, I analyse the match.
The horror never ends for Diego Schwartzman. The man from Buenos Aires has lost eleven of his last twelve matches. Everything was supposed to get better last week at his hometown tournament.
But it only got worse. In the second round, the man from the city of “good airs” lost clearly 6-1, 6-3 to Bernabe Zapata Miralles.
Although Schwartzman is not known as a service specialist, the record of having won only one service game in the entire match is shocking.
In no phase of the two-set match did the 30-year-old develop the right touch. The balls regularly flew sideways or over the baseline.
When the yellow felt balls landed in his opponent’s court, they were usually too short. He could not build up a feeling for the baseline and generally for the distance of his shots.
Again and again, the 1.70-metre tall Schwartzman stood motionless and desperate on the spot after losing points. He could no longer get out of the negative tunnel.
His opponent Zapata Miralles showed a completely different body language, playing the Argentine up against the wall with a lot of precision and the right dosage of risk.
In Rio, Dusan Lajovic is now waiting in round one. Like Schwartzman, the Serb also prefers to play on clay. Last week, after two wins in the qualifiers, he still managed to take out Sebastian Baez and Camilo Ugo Carabelli in the first two rounds.
In the quarter-finals, however, it was all over against Carlos Alcaraz (6-4,6-2). However, the 32-year-old can be satisfied with six wins against one of the best clay players in the world.
Twice he was able to take the service game from the former world number one. However, five breaks of his own prevented a surprise against the eventual tournament winner.
What is striking when looking at the last five matches of Lajovic and Schwartzman is the fact that in the last five two-set winning tournaments, often only two sets were played.
The Argentine lost all five appearances in this series in two sets. For Lajovic, four of his last five matches went over two sets. Only against Baez did it go the full distance.
A bet on exactly two sets in Tuesday’s match will be interesting with regard to these statistics. Betano offers odds of 1.62 for this bet.
If Schwartzman does not come out of his slump in Rio either, the bet “2:0 for Lajovic” could also be considered. Betano assigns 2.50 odds to this market.
To get an even better overview of the upcoming match between the two clay court specialists, the Head2Head comparison should not be missed.
The last three duels went to the Argentine. In 2020 and 2018, they met at the Australian Open. In 2018, it took five sets to find a winner.
At the 2017 clay-court tournament in Istanbul, Schwartzman secured a two-set victory (7-5, 6-2). In the first meeting between the two in the 2015 Davis Cup, Lajovic still won 6-1,6-4.
In summary, it must be said that the last match between Lajovic and Schwartzman was three years ago and the record is less meaningful than the current form of the tennis pros.
And that speaks for itself. While Schwartzman is still winless on clay this year and has lost nine of his last ten matches, Lajovic has won six of his last ten.
His performance looks even better if you only consider the last matches on clay. By winning the Challenger in Maspalomas and the victories in Buenos Aires, he has a statistic of ten wins from the last twelve matches.
The form of both tennis players could hardly be more different. Schwartzman is suffering defeat after defeat and Lajovic is in good form on clay.
Even though the Argentinian has won the last three duels, I see Lajovic ahead on Tuesday evening.
That’s why I’m going for a win bet on Lajovic in my Lajovic Schwartzman tip.
