Borna Coric vs Grigor Dimitrov US Open Picks 8/28/2019

Borna Coric vs Grigor Dimitrov

10 am EST, 28th August 2019

New York, NY (USA)

Hard courts

Borna Coric retired in quarterfinals of Halle, a couple of weeks before Wimbledon. That back injury was so severe that he was forced to withdraw from third Grand Slam of the season, held at All England Lawn Tennis club. He returned just in time for ATP Umag in his home country, Croatia. But it was obvious that he is not quite ready yet, which resulted in a loss to Salvatore Caruso. He wasn't able to raise the level of his game for the American hard-court swing and won only 1 of 3 matches before arriving to New York. That didn't seem to bother him, because he took care of Donskoy quite easily in the first round. It seems that the key moment of the match was the unconverted set point in the first set for Donskoy, after which he wasn't playing that well anymore and won only 3 games in the 2nd and 3rd set combined. Serving performance by the Croat was extremly impressive. He had 10 aces, won 88% points in his serving games and offered zero break opportunities to his opponent. He was also very solid from the baseline during the rallies, which was the reason why Donskoy had only 20 winners and 33 unforced errors.

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This should be one of the most interesting matches of this round. Grigor Dimitrov was once a No.3 player in the world but played nothing like it lately. His entire season was quite terrible actually. He has a negative record (12-15) and has slid to 78th place in the rankings. It seemed at times that he is starting to play better. But because of his low ranking, he was bumping into some good players in early rounds and couldn't win matches, even when playing decent tennis. That is what happened in Montreal and Cincinnati, where he played Stan Wawrinka back-to-back. He pushed him into the third set tie-break in the second match but unfortunately fell short once again. Similar to Coric, he was able to mentally recover from that and win his first-round match at US Open. Andreas Seppi can be a tricky opponent at times, but he had no chance in this one. Not with all the pressure that Dimitrov was able to put on his serve. Grigor had whooping 21 break points and converted 7 of those for a comfortable win in 4 sets.

Matchup

For two guys that are competing on the Tour for quite some time, it's amazing that they never played an official match. But I'm guessing it's not that difficult to predict how they match up against each other. Dimitrov is the more aggressive of the two. He will rely on his ball-striking to test Coric's defense, which is usually on a very high level. But, if he can find some of his old form, he should be able to hit through the court and make this match very competitive.

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Betting odds & prediction

Dimitrov opened around +170 at some places. With the public mostly liking the dog in this spot, odds took a dive and are currently around +150. The spread is -3, while the total is sitting at 39. Even though the number is quite high, I'm leaning towards the over. I'm expecting a close match. Can't see either of these two guys winning in straight sets at the moment. They will go back and forth, exchanging the lead and momentum during the match. Both are quite solid servers, which will increase the chance of tie-breaks happening in this match.

Pick: over 39 games (-112)

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