Marin Cilic vs Diego Schwartzman ATP Moneyline Picks - 6/19/2019

Marin Cilic vs Diego Schwartzman

5 am EST, 19th June 2019

ATP London, England

Grass courts

Coming into his first round match, Diego Schwartzman was not getting a whole lot of respect from the betting market. He played Alexander Bublik, who is ranked just inside top 100 and has barely played any tennis on the main tour. But he was favored by quite a bit in this one. And I don't think it had much to do with him, but rather showing no love for Schwartzman on grass, which was much easier to do with his current form being not that great lately. He came to this tournament with 1-8 grass court record and no previous appearance at this event. But that didn't seem to bother him much, with only 53 minutes needed to get past the player from Kazakhstan. We could argue if this was a legit win or not because Bublik has a tendency to flop like this and not show much effort when the things aren't going his way. Argentine wasn't asked to do much. He was solid from the baseline, committing very few errors and waited for another bad attempt at a drop shot by Bublik.

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He will be asked to do much more in the next one. Marin Cilic is the defending champion of the Fever-Tree championship. This is one of his favorite events. 2 titles, 2-time runner-up, and a 29-9 record at Queen's Club. He is a very dangerous grass court player when he can put it all together. He looked lethal in the first set yesterday vs Christian Garin, winning it in just over 20 minutes. The second one was a bit more competitive. He failed to serve it out at 5-4, which is becoming his trademark, but fortunately, it didn't come back to haunt him, because he finished the job in the tie-break. And he managed to win it in straight sets despite serving below expectations. Cilic can usually do way better on grass then 7/5 aces to double faults and 70% points won behind his serve. But, it's encouraging that he was returning really well, winning 50% of those points and breaking Garin's serve 4 out of 9 times.

Matchup

Watching some matches on Day 1, I noticed that the playing conditions are not as fast as I expected them to be. Is that because the grass was still intact and maybe bit too high, I'm not sure. But I believe that we should expect similar playing conditions in next couple of days. At first thought, you might think that should help Diego Schwartzman in this matchup, as someone that doesn't prefer to play on very fast playing surfaces. But I think that we still have to treat it as grass courts. Being slightly slower might just allow margins on the scoreboard to be a bit wider, because some of the guys that are not top-tier servers, will not get away with much here. And we saw a great example of that in the first round when Cilic was able to jump on every opportunity when Garin was serving and break it 4 times in the match.

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Betting odds & prediction

And something similar might happen here as well. Schwartzman's serve will not be as protected by these conditions as it would be in faster ones. It will give an opportunity to Cilic to be more aggressive with his return. During the rallies, Schwartzman did manage to outlast Bublik, but that will not be as easy vs big-hitting Croatian, who can hit through opposing defense while not committing too many unforced errors. Spread line being -4.5 at the moment is just about right in my opinion. But the total at 22 is a bit generous. With breaks of serve easier to come by, I don't see Schwartzman managing to drag the sets to the distance too often. And Marin would have to have a really bad day to drop a set to Diego in this situation.

Guy's Pick: under 22 games (-105)

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