tennis | Friday, April 21, 2023 11:20 AM

Friday Tennis Best Bet: WTA Stuttgart, Anastasia Potapova vs Caroline Garcia

Jon Reid

Anastasia Potapova vs Caroline Garcia Best Bet: Friday, April 21st

Well the +1.5 sets and over 21 games bets both ended up voided with Pinnacle as Elena Rybakina retired (they appeared to be going 1-1 anyway), but we cash the higher odds bet on Beatriz Haddad Maia to win as the first set completed!

For Friday, we’ll delve into the match between Anastasia Potapova and Caroline Garcia.

In this article:

Anastasia Potapova vs Caroline Garcia Preview
Anastasia Potapova vs Caroline Garcia Best Bet

Anastasia Potapova vs Caroline Garcia Preview

April 21st, 14:30 (UK Time)

Fairly surprising to see Potapova as the favourite in this matchup.

While she’s certainly starting to put things together and live up to her potential, I’m not sure she’s quite at the level of Garcia just yet.

What is particularly surprising about this pricing is that this is the clay that most rewards serve-oriented players (along with the event in Madrid that takes place next week), which is a part of the game that Garcia is undoubtedly better in.

The Frenchwoman possesses a booming serve that is able to rack up cheap, quick points when she’s landing a decent number of her first deliveries.

Conversely, Potapova has some incredible power from the baseline, but her serves are a tad underwhelming.

She did win a very high percentage of her first serve points against Coco Gauff in her last match, but overall in the last 52 weeks on clay, she wins under 62% of her first serve points and about 47% of points behind her second serves. Even against a stubbornly aggressive returner like Garcia, those numbers just won’t cut it if the Frenchwoman is anywhere close to landing a normal number of first serve points in her own right.

In terms of baseline power, Potapova can hit from both wings, but with Garcia more than capable of hitting big shots of her own, I’m not sure where Potapova has the edge in this matchup to make up for the deficit in her service game.

Anastasia Potapova vs Caroline Garcia Best Bet

For me, this simply comes down to the fact that the wrong woman is favoured.
If you want to go larger on this bet, I wouldn’t blame you. I do have a nice Garcia outright ticket, though, and I’m not looking to double down on someone that can take winnable points on return and play unnecessarily aggressive tennis and play herself into a closer match than she should.

It happened against Tatjana Maria in the last round, so I’ll stick with a 3/10 staking here and hope her superior game wins out.