Indian Wells: Francisco Cerúndolo gave battle, but couldn’t with Felix Auger-Aliassime

One more time, Happy Auger-Also closed the door to the advance of Francisco Cerundolo. In the third wheel Masters 1000 de Indian Wellsthe Canadian, 8th favorite, won 7-5, 6-4, in 2 hours and 10 minutes of action, and sealed his pass to the round of 16 of the tournament that is played on Californian cement.

The meeting between the Argentine and the Canadian started with an unusual event. In the third game, Auger-Aliassime prepared to receive a service from Cerúndolo, but after hitting, he brushed the racket with his chin at the completion of the stroke, and there was a cut. Since she had bled, the physiotherapist had to be called in to close the wound, which later became slightly inflamed. It was not about anything that could affect the tennis player excessively, but it was an action out of the ordinary.

In the match, the Argentine had to be down on the scoreboard for several sections. He lost his kickoff, and recovered in the fourth game for 2-2. He had his only favorable passage in the 10th game, when he was 5-4 and Auger-Aliassime was 0-30. But the Canadian rallied, winning four points in a row and evening the score; then he broke and then closed out the first set with an ace. At that decisive moment, the world number 10 won 12 of the last 15 points played in that first set.

After finding the imbalance, Auger-Aliassime continued her dominance in the second set. He persisted with aggressive play, found stinging returns to break in the third and seventh games, and go ahead 5-2. But the Canadian missed two match-points with his serve, had a slew of unforced errors, and gave Cerúndolo one more life, who came close in the count. In a very entertaining and intense tenth game, and also the longest of the match, the Argentine had his chances to equalize it; he accumulated the 10th in the world with more match points, until he managed to close it in the sixth match-point, when the porteño went wide with a forehand.

For Cerúndolo, it was his second defeat of the year against the Canadian, who had eliminated him last January in the third round of the Australian Open, but that time in a much more favorable development match for the 22-year-old player born in Montreal.

Despite the stumble in the third round of the first Masters 1000 of the season, Cerúndolo will continue near the Top 30 of the ranking at the end of the tournament. But the demands will grow a lot for what is coming: The next appointment will be the Masters 1000 in Miami, and there the Argentine defends 360 points for having reached the semifinals last year, in one of the best performances of his career. It is not a minor number: it is almost 30 percent of his total score, so having a good performance on the Florida concrete will be crucial to continue within the top 30 or 40 of the circuit.

So far in 2023, Cerúndolo has had a tour with ups and downs, with 8 wins and 8 losses. He had his best performances at the Australian Open, where he reached the third round, and at the Argentina Open, in which he reached the quarterfinals. It will be seen if in Miami he can repeat his great campaign of twelve months ago, when he defeated, among others, Reilly Opelka, Frances Tiafoe and Jannik Sinner, before falling in the final before the Norwegian Casper Ruud.

Without Argentines in the race

The defeat of Cerúndolo was later added to the elimination of Sebastian Baez. The player who emerged in San Martín fell resoundingly 6-1 and 6-2 against the American Taylor Fritz, 5th in the ranking and defending champion. Similar in unforced errors (23 for the local, against 25 for the Argentine), Fritz took the distance in the winning shots: 20 against 9. And the biggest difference was in the service, where the Top 5 won 88 percent of the points played with his first serve, against just 47% achieved by Báez, who endured 6 breaks.

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