Madrid NOTEBOOK DUMP (Jodar-Fonseca, Underarm Serves, Cramping) | Monday Match Analysis

**Gill Gross** (0:03)
Welcome, everyone, to Monday Match Analysis. I'm Gill Gross. We're going to do a Madrid Week 1 Notebook Dump. Kind of doing it frantically here last minute. I've got a flight to catch, and Rafael Jodar, Joao Fonseca, are just starting their third set right now. I would love nothing more than to watch the third set and then have done this podcast afterwards, but I am completely out of time, and I would be missing my flight, and we can't be having that. So here I am, start of the third. I don't know what the result is going to be, but it's pretty much lived up to it. It's been awesome to watch the only two teenagers in the top 100, the only two players born in 2006 or later to have won an ATP title, to face off on a huge stage in Jodar's home city. This has been awesome. It's lived up to it. Look, I think, tactically, just a few notes, and I'm not going to go crazy here.
It's so much about who gets on offense first. I don't see a lot of points getting turned around. These guys are not moving well enough to really absorb each other's power, so to speak. And Jodar in the first set, I think, did a slightly better job at just getting on top of points using his first strike. I think he landed more effectively aggressive returns, maybe served a little bit better than Fonseca throughout the set. But at the end of the day, it comes down to a tie break, where Fonseca actually has the looks that he wants, gets in the positions that he wants to get into off of a plus one on the first point and on the third point off of a cross court forehand, where he has a short ball and he has it down the line forehand lined up, and he just misses it wide. Two forehand unforced errors by Fonseca, start of the first set tie break, that puts him in a hole. Jodar also hit another great backhand second serve return, where he takes it early on the rise, finds the center of the string bed, and just pings it down the line on the ad side. He is so good at taking that backhand early, getting on top of it. He is the kind of player, and I am saying this more and more often as the years go on, you have got to be really, really careful hitting a kick serve to Jodar's backhand because he is so good at taking it early on the rise and just getting that ball on you or away from you because it is so well directed often. It is a great backhand return that Jodar possesses. So that kind of decided the first set tie break and then a bit of a concentration lapse by Jodar at the start of the second set getting broken from up 40 love and making some mistakes. I do think there is a detectable forehand, a forehand advantage for Fonseca from what I have seen so far. Jodar is awesome when he gets his feet set and he is in the middle of the court, particularly when he is inside the court. He obviously has a deadly forehand. When he is on the move to his right or when he is pushed back, he doesn't really get easy depth off of his forehand.
Sometimes, it gets, you could say, almost overspun and short. Then the ball hangs for Fonseca to play from a nice contact point with plenty of time. When it is kind of chest level for Fonseca and he has had time to load up, you are like ducking in front of the TV because he is probably going to hang around the triple digits from that position and I just think forehand to forehand, it is Jodar who has been sort of dropping the ball short when he has pressured moving to his right more so than Fonseca, who in fairness does miss sometimes when he has pressured into the deuce court but doesn't usually drop the ball short. I do think circumstantially, I am saying this before I know who is going to win the match, but the circumstances are good for Jodar as Fonseca gets broken and obliterates a racket which I don't know if I have ever seen him do.
Maybe I have seen him crack a racket before, but that was violent. So whatever happened in that love one game, Fonseca was not happy about it. Jodar has played in altitude his whole life, he has already won two matches. Fonseca got a withdrawal so hasn't even played. So he hasn't really felt the match conditions or really had a chance to, I guess, build up his confidence in these conditions, which I think means something. I mean, the seeds, they have trouble in Madrid in this format. When the top 32 seeds have a buy and they have to go up against somebody who's already played a match in these weird conditions that takes a little while for the players to get used to, we see carnage for the seeds at this tournament every single year and that's kind of the position that Fonseca is in. And I also think there's probably a little bit more pressure on Joao. There's pressure on both of them, undoubtedly. But Fonseca has been sort of anointed and Jodar is in the early stages of his ascendancy.