Alexander Zverev has a chance to boost his ATP Finals chances by quite a bit, but he needs to defeat Roman Safiullin in the Chengdu Open final to do that.
Zverev has been playing fairly solid tennis since touching down in China, winning a couple of matches comfortably. His toughest challenge came against Grigor Dimitrov, but he passed it with flying colours, earning a chance to play a very tricky player in the ATP 250 final.
Safiullin is not a player who you'd expect in finals, but he's been working hard in the past two years, and his improvement is noticeable. Playing on a court that matches his strengths with the serve and forehand certainly helps.
It's an interesting matchup on paper, one Zverev should win comfortably given the talent disparity however, if he will get his second trophy of the year after winning in Hamburg remains to be seen. Let's see what might happen.
Head-to-head:
If we look at the H2H between these players, we see that Zerev won their only previous meeting. It happened two years ago at the French Open. The result is not shocking, a straight sets victory, but two of those sets went to a tiebreak, and that's the key to remember.
Safiullin has an excellent serve and a good forehand, which makes him very tough to counter on the courts in Chengdu. Zverev is the same way, so this might be another close one; actually, I'm pretty certain of it.
Prediction:
Considering all of that, it becomes pretty clear that we might actually see one or two tiebreaks in this one. If that happens, the player with the better serving day will likely win the match. It can be either player because Zverev does have the stronger serve overall, but he's also more prone to missing it.
We know his double faults troubles, and they did cost him matches in the past. He's been pretty sharp this week and when that happens he generally sees it out so I'm going to back him to get the win tomorrow as well.
Prediction: Alexander Zverev to win in two sets.
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