2020 Mexican Open finalist Taylor Harry Fritz clashes with Cameron Norrie in this first round fixture of the 2020 St. Petersburg Open. The match is scheduled to begin at around 2 pm local time (12 noon BST or 7 am Eastern Time) on Monday, October 12. Get the live streaming options of this Taylor Harry Fritz v Cameron Norrie match along with its preview, head to head, and tips here.
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Taylor Fritz v Cameron Norrie Head to Head
This will be the fifth meeting between the two players, and the second one this year. They both have an even 2-2 head-to-head record.
Cameron Norrie won their last head-to-head in The Delray Beach Open earlier this year, beating Fritz 2 sets to 1 in the first round of that competition. His other victory came in The 2019 ATP Auckland Open, bettering Fritz in straight sets en route to the competition’s final.
Fritz’s two triumphs over Norrie both came in 2019. The first was a straight sets victory in The Australian Open, and the other came in the semifinals of The Atlanta Open, a competition that he later won.
Additionally, all their head-to-head meetings have been on hard courts.
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Fritz Hoping to Better His Previous ATP 500 Final
Fritz comes into the tournament as the 8th seed and will be looking to capitalize on that ranking. He still may be termed as a young player, but some of his performances earlier on in the year showed the maturity and mastery that aged pros often ooze.
The best example of this is his run to the Mexican Open final, where he beat higher-ranked players like the seeded John Isner, and only lost to a seasoned and finessed Rafael Nadal in the final.
That has been his best run so far this year. Since then, he’s had mixed performances, especially after professional tennis returned later on in the year.
He may have made it into the third round of both the US Open and the French Open, the furthest that he’s ever gone in any Grand Slam competition, but first-round defeats in the Italian Open and in Hamburg—both to opponents he was expected to defeat—have thrown a little shadow of doubt over his current form.
He’ll be hoping to gather some momentum and try to replicate his Mexican Open form, and maybe even go 1 step further than he did in that competition and win his first ATP 500 tournament. He’s facing an opponent that he should beat on paper, but they both know each other a bit too well to make this a straightforward affair.
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Norrie’s Form a Worry?
It’s not hard to see why Cameron Norrie comes into the match as the underdog.
Unlike Fritz who’s had occasional bursts of steady form this year, Norrie has struggled to make any tangible impact in the tournaments he’s played.
The US Open may be his most respectable achievement of the year, where he made it into the third round, but other than that, he’s had to settle for first and second-round eliminations, a sharp contrast to the 2019 form that saw him reach two semifinals and an ATP 500 final.
Despite this, he’ll be buoyed by the fact that Fritz is also currently struggling for some steady form. With some recent history between them, some of which has tilted in his favor, he’ll be looking to use this to his advantage.
With Fritz also struggling to handle the favorites tag in some of the other competitions that he’s played in recently, and with a seeded tag slapped on him as well, Norrie may manipulate this and use it as a way of easing the pressure off of his shoulders.
He’ll also be happy to be back on a hard court, which he fares better on statistically, and will be ready to break Fritz’s dominant serves.
Fritz v Norrie Prediction and Tip
Although the bookies’ tide seems to be in Fritz’s favor, this will be a harder match than many have made it out to be. There might even be another first-round upset in this one with Fritz crashing out again early on. But with how tight and hard-fought I expect the match to be, the safest call seems in guaranteeing that there’ll be anything but a win in straight sets.
Tip: Three sets in the match: 6/4 (bet365)
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The St. Petersburg Open 2020 will be played from October 12 to October 18. You can watch & bet on the St. Petersburg Open here. Get your latest premium tennis predictions here.
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