How Cerundolo & Tiafoe Won Their Biggest-Ever Titles | Monday Match Analysis

**Gill Gross** (0:01)
Welcome, everyone, to Monday Match Analysis. I'm Gill Gross, a couple of first time 500 title winners this week. It is Francisco Cerundolo at the Queen's Club, beating Tommy Paul in a three set final, his biggest career trophy, and the same can be said for Frances Tiafoe in Halle, who pulls off his first win over Taylor Fritz since 2016 And I can't wait to dissect both of those finals on this week's Monday Match Analysis. This is one of my favorite weeks of the year on the ATP calendar. I love these two Grass Court 500s. Just a really great format. And the urgency to get ready for Wimbledon is always high. So the fields are great. I love this week. That said, to paint grass court tennis with a broad brush after watching these two tournaments side by side would be absolutely crazy. To say that Halle and Queen's belong in the same category of conditions and to just say, oh, it's grass court tennis.
Tiafoe won on grass. Cerundolo won on grass. Same thing. It's so not the case. These tournaments play so differently. To watch it throughout the week was staggering. Not that this is a completely new thing, but it just felt very glaring. This week. So let's start with Queens.
And let's talk about Francisco Cerundolo, who is very much attached to Clay and very much known as a player who I'm not going to call him a specialist because specialists are almost extinct at this point, but just unanimously known to be his best surface, Clay, wins his biggest career title on grass and wins his second career title on grass after winning Eastbourne a couple of years ago. Let's first try to make sense out of this. Remember when it comes to a surface and how it suits a player's game, it doesn't have to be strength accentuation. So strength accentuation, that would be, well, I have a great serve and grass helps the serve. It accentuates my serve. So I like grass. It might be, well, I'm a flat hitter and grass rewards flat hitting. It accentuates that. But it's not always that. Sometimes it's weakness mitigation. And I think for Francisco Cerundolo on grass, it falls into the weakness mitigation bucket to a large extent because his weakness is his first serve, his ability to gain an advantage with it and do damage with it. And it comes a lot easier to him on grass. He has a slicey first serve, which is under speed averaging around 117 miles per hour on average.
But it's got some slice action to it. And on grass, if you put it in a good spot and you hit a slice serve, it doesn't need to be super fast. You can still make some progress on it. So this is the Tennis Insights first serve effectiveness rating. And I'll walk you through this graphic and I'll talk it out, as I always do for those listening on audio platforms. First serve effectiveness, an effective serve classified as either an ace, a service winner, in other words, a return error or a plus one attack. And on average, Cerundolo is at 55.9 percent first serve effectiveness. That's very low. The Tor average is 61.2 percent. So Cerundolo, that fleshes it out. It's a below average first serve on Grass, or more specifically this week in Queen's, that first serve effectiveness goes up to 62.8 percent. So he goes from below Tor average to above Tor average because he is in more serve friendly conditions. And the reward that Cerundolo gets for effective first serves, I would argue, is a whole lot higher than the reward that most players would get for an effective first serve. Because he's got an elite plus one forehand, an absolutely menacing, terrifying plus one forehand. If he can just set it up with effective first serves, he gets a ton of purchase out of that. I'll give you a couple of examples in this final where his first strike tennis came up huge against Tommy Paul. Second set for all 15-40. He's down a set and double break point at for all. This is looking like a Tommy Paul win at this moment in time. Two damaging first serves, two big plus one forehand finishes. One was a winner. One was, I think, an approach shot that forced an error. Third set, he's up for two. He's trying to protect this one break lead. He's facing a break point, comes up with an ace. One of the better serves I've seen Francisco Cerundolo hit in my life, in a big moment. Okay, obviously, I'm sure at some point or another, he's hit a better serve. But in a final down break point, 127 mile per hour serve out wide for an ace to save that break point. Now, he missed an easy plus one forehand, which doesn't happen very often, to keep Paul alive in this 4-2 game. Ended up facing a break point later in that game. Another one, and Tommy missed a routine backhand long. We'll talk about Paul's backhand. But Cerundolo got out of that game with a couple of effective first serves from Deuce, setting up a plus one approach shot, finished off the volley, which was a tough volley, and then a second serve that had so much kick on it, it actually led to a hanging return that Cerundolo could pound away on his forehand, plus one forehand winner there. So he gets out of the game. And that's just an example of good serving by Cerundolo in big spots in this final. And you're going to see more, again, effective serving from Cerundolo on the surface. So that's how I would make sense out of Cerundolo on grass. That said, and don't get it twisted, Francisco Cerundolo did not win this title by playing classical grass court tennis. If your idea of grass court tennis is a lot of aces and service winners and service holds and not a lot of long rallies, the kind of tennis that we saw in Stuttgart last week and the kind of tennis that we saw in Halle this week on the German grass, if that's your idea of grass court tennis, this was not that. Cerundolo in zero through four shot rallies for the week was dead even, 50-50.