French Open in Paris, 2nd round, Thursday, 29.05.2024
Superb debut at the French Open for Jan-Lennard Struff, who won in three sets against Roman Andres Burruchaga without conceding a single service game. In any case, the Warstein native is playing a very strong clay court season.
His opponent in round two is Alexander Bublik, who is considered a real wonder bag. But his world ranking of 17th shows the qualities of the reigning indoor champion, even though clay is his weakest surface. In my Struff Bublik betting tip, I’m therefore going for Struff to win the match and only drop one set at most. The right odds are provided by Winamax
Placing a sports bet when Bublik is on court is definitely not without its drawbacks. The Kazakh has many faces on the pitch. He can drive the best in the world to despair when his shoulder smoothly delivers his serves, but he can also resignedly give away sets 0-6 when he’s not having a good day.
In Monaco, during his 1-6, 1-6 defeat against Borna Coric, he let the ball girl serve in between. Of course, the point was not scored, but it shows that Bublik’s main priority is to have fun.
It remains to be seen whether Coric would have taken part in the show. The ball girl copied too much from the Kazakh and served the unofficial ninth double fault. Bublik, who has already won four titles, also scattered a few of them in his first round match against Gregoire Barrere
His record at 6-4, 7-5, 6-3: eleven aces and twelve double faults. He only won 47 percent of the points on his second serve. He only hit 54 percent of his first serves into the targeted court, enough to clinch his fifth clay court win of the year.
This is the first time since 2016 that Bublik has had a positive clay record of 5/4, while Struff has already notched up ten wins, including his long-awaited first career title in Munich.
He has only been beaten by three of the top 5 favorites at the French Open, Jannik Sinner was eliminated from the field in Monaco, Carlos Alcaraz in Madrid and Stefanos Tsitsipas was the final stop in Rome; he also won nine of his ten victories outright
These consistently good performances make him the favorite with the best betting providers, who already have all the odds ready for the European Championships, despite his significantly lower ranking in the world rankings.
Struff is given odds of 1.32, while Bublik has odds of 3.35 at Winamax. The community is not entirely unanimous as to who will win the match. In fact, only 72 percent of users have faith in the German. So far, complete conviction is evident in the “Over 3.5 sets” market. As things stand, no one has opted for the under variant.
However, Struff’s success with a maximum of four sets is the better option. He hardly lets anything go wrong in his service games and Bublik gets into trouble from time to time, especially when the risk doesn’t pay off several times on the second serve
In addition, Struff has a strong record of nine straight wins out of ten, only dropping one set in his first clay court victory this year. And then there is the one-sided direct comparison.
Struff leads the duel 3:1 and also won the only clay court match six years ago, although Bublik was quite inexperienced back then at the age of 20. But the Munich champion also dominated the next two matches.
His only defeat came last year in Halle, the tournament in which Bublik won his only 500 title to date. But instead of fast grass conditions, the weather in Paris is currently dominated by cold and wet weather with a maximum temperature of 17 degrees Celsius. Struff has already proven in the Bavarian capital that he is adaptive and can play well in these conditions
My Struff Bublik tip
3:1 in the direct duel, a resounding victory in the first clay court match against Bublik, the clearly better clay court player, the more consistent service games, the better adaptability in unpleasant weather conditions, the list of advantages for Struff is long.
The Warstein native is also in very good form, having won ten of his 13 matches on red clay, nine of them without losing a set. With the following odds, he should lose one more against a player who has a positive win record on clay for the first time since 2016.
My Struff Bublik tip: Victory Struff (-1.5 set HC)
