Day 2 at the Chengdu Open brings a full slate of hard court action at the Sichuan International Tennis Centre, and there are some genuinely interesting first round contests to get stuck into. Here are my thoughts on three of the matches on offer and where I think the results are heading.
These two have only met once before, back in Munich in 2022 on clay, where Kecmanovic came through in straight sets. That is the entire head to head record, so it tells us very little about what to expect here on hardcourt in China four years later. Kecmanovic is a reliable, well organised baseliner who has kept himself comfortably inside the world’s top 50 through consistency rather than fireworks. He reads the game well and makes very few unforced errors, but he rarely takes a match away from you with pure aggression.
Basilashvili is a completely different animal. On any given day he can dismantle a top ten player with that thunderous forehand, and on any given day he can lose to someone ranked well below him. That unpredictability is what defines him at this stage of his career. The key question is simply which version of the Georgian turns up. If his first serve is working and that forehand is landing with authority, the raw power should be too much for Kecmanovic’s measured counter punching approach to handle.
I am backing the big Georgian to have one of his better days here.
This is the fourth time these two have faced each other, and Sonego leads the head to head 2 wins to 1. The trouble is that those Sonego wins came on grass some time ago and feel irrelevant to what is happening right now. The most recent meeting between them is far more instructive. Duckworth beat Sonego convincingly, 7 sets to 5 and 6 sets to 3, in Winston Salem just weeks ago, and the Australian went on to reach the semi finals of that tournament. That is serious recent momentum.
Sonego, on the other hand, is a player who has been in steady decline from the heights that once had him threatening the top 20. His ranking has been sliding for a while now and a drop outside the top 100 is looking increasingly plausible if things do not turn around soon. The talent is still in there somewhere, and on a genuinely good day he has the weapons to cause problems for anybody in this draw. The problem is that those good days have become rare exceptions rather than the norm.
Duckworth is simply the more dependable option right now. He is playing with confidence off the back of that Winston Salem run, he has already beaten Sonego recently, and he does not rely on form streaks to compete. I lean Duckworth here without much hesitation.
Hurkacz has an absolutely dominant record against Shevchenko, winning all four of their previous meetings and dropping only two sets across the lot. That kind of one sided head to head tells you something real about how these two match up. Hurkacz clearly has Shevchenko’s number, and the Pole arrives in Chengdu in noticeably better nick than he has been for a while, having won 11 of his last 15 matches as he works his way back towards the level that brought him a career high ranking of world number 6 before injury disrupted his progress.
Shevchenko is going through a rough patch by any measure, with just two wins from his last nine matches. That is poor form against an opponent who has never lost to him, and it is hard to construct any kind of compelling case for an upset. The form gap is real, the historical record is firmly against him, and Hurkacz looks motivated and sharp coming into this tournament.
This looks straightforward on paper and I see no reason to overthink it.
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