Marco Cecchinato vs Alex De Minaur Wimbledon Point Spread Picks - 7/2/2019
Marco Cecchinato vs Alex De Minaur
5:30 am EST, 2nd July 2019
Wimbledon, England
Grass courts
Nobody is really taking Marco Cecchinato too seriously during this stretch of the season. And they're probably right. After making a career breakthrough last year with that semifinals at Roland Garros, he mostly struggled this year. He is only 11-14 YTD and apart from that title in Buenos Aires, he looked sub-par for the rest of the season. On grass, he lost both matches so far. In London, he had no chance vs Milos Raonic and something similar happened in Eastbourne against Hubert Hurkacz. But playing poorly on grass isn't really that big of a surprise. He entered June in a poor form already, losing a lot of matches on his beloved clay courts. The most surprising of them all was probably in the first round of Roland Garros, where he was 2-0 up against Nicolas Mahut, but allowed Frenchman to come back and steal it from him. His grass court results are not much to talk about. 2-5 lifetime and still winless in Wimbledon.
On the other side, we have someone with a similar record (3-5), but unlike Cecchinato, he loves to play on this surface. Alex De Minaur actually considers grass to be his favorite playing surface and is someone that should have much better results on this surface than he does at the moment. Why it didn't work out for him thus far is a bit of a mystery, at least to some degree. In the past two tournaments, he lost twice as a favorite, which might indicate that he is slightly overvalued in these conditions by the market. He should not be losing to a guy like Aljaz Bedene as he did in Queens a couple of weeks ago. But we can't really say it was too big of a surprise when we look at his entire 2019 season. Apart from that great start in Brisbane and Sydney, he did very little the rest of the way. In those two tournaments, he accumulated more than 50% of his wins YTD. He is defending points from 3rd round last year when he lost to Rafael Nadal.
Matchup
They played each other twice so far and have split it to one each. Cecchinato was better in Rome a couple of months ago, while De Minaur won at Wimbledon last year. And that is the intriguing one, which can help us handicap this next match. De Minaur was -225 favorite in that match but won after a fierce battle in 4 very close sets. It is true that Cecchinato was in much better form at that point, but so was the Aussie. What I'm trying to say is that De Minaur didn't really manage to sell many grass court tricks to the Italian, which is an important piece of information for this next match.
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Betting odds & prediction
So, if he doesn't know how to gameplan to use the playing conditions in his favor vs a clay-courter, what other advantages does he have? The form? No, not really. They are both struggling at the moment. Overall ability? Don't think so. Their skill sets are different, but I couldn't say that De Minaur is a better player overall then Cecchinato. With all that being said, we have to ask ourselves, why then is he favored 5 to 1 to win this match. In my opinion, it is because of an incorrect perception of him having a huge edge over Cecchinato on the grass courts. In theory, he should, but he failed to back it up with some results so far. Trusting Marco on grass is probably not going to be a profitable strategy in most scenarios, but in this spot, I simply have to do it with De Minaur being wildly overpriced.
Guy's Pick: Marco Cecchinato +398
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