Zhizhen Zhang vs Marcos Giron Prediction, Stats, Form, H2H, April 9th

Play rolls on at the ATP Masters event in Monte Carlo. Let’s look at Zhizhen Zhang vs Marcos Giron first up on the court, as Monte Carlo tends to get started early and wrap up action earlier than most tournaments as well.

The market has Giron winning 46.7% of the time, while Zhang is favored to win at 1.78 odds. The handicap is one game and the total game line is 22.5.

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Zhang vs Giron Prediction: Zhang the Superior Clay Courter

• Prediction: Zhang to win
• Best Odds: 1.81
• Bookmaker: Pinnacle
• Stakes: 4/10

Odds as at 1:30 am UK Time on April 9th, 2024. Odds may now differ.

Neither of these guys may be a major threat on clay, but I’m much bigger on Zhang’s game being able to translate on clay relative to his counterpart in this matchup.

He can match Giron on serve and in the aggression department, but his shots are far more likely to be able to cut through the slower clay and still allow him to dictate play. He’s also always looked more comfortable than Giron playing on the surface. His movement is more natural and his sliding is also more competent than Giron’s.

We’ll go over Giron’s schedule from 2023’s clay season, but I will say there’s a reason he doesn’t play a lot of the tournaments at sea level on the slower red dirt.

We’ve more matches covered from Tuesday’s tennis action at the Rolex Monte Carlo Masters over on the Expert Insights page.

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Zhizhen Zhang Recent Form

When you watch Zhang play, you couldn’t be faulted for assuming some of the bigger, lower-margin, flat-hitting would not work on clay courts.

For the last few clay seasons though, he’s proven to be surprisingly strong on the surface in certain instances. He’s not a world beater on the dirt by any means, but we only need him to be better than his opponent on the day for this wager, and I’m confident that he is far more often than not.

Not only does he have the power to hit through the slow surface, but slower clay courts also help mask one of his primary weaknesses. One of the knocks on his game is that he doesn’t have a second gear or the willingness to be patient and play defensively when the situation calls for it. That leads to him being rushed and hitting a lot of low-margin shots that end up as errors. With the slower play on clay, we see him with more time to set those shots up, giving him more of a chance to keep the ball in play and seize control of points.

In 2022, he reached the semifinals or better of the last five Challenger Tour events he played and last year he had a few nice runs at the main tour level, with his losses coming to established main tour clay courters like Casper Ruud, Laslo Djere and Dominic Thiem (though Thiem’s struggles had begun at the time) or some of the top young talents in Arthur Fils (who won the title that week in Lyon) and Hamad Medjedovic.

With the questions about his style on slow courts having been asked and answered, I’m happy to back him here.

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Marcos Giron Recent Form

How things can change in six weeks. Just a month and a half ago, Giron was coming off of a final in Dallas in a week he dominated most of his competition and then a semifinal in Delray Beach – only losing to top-15 players. Since that point? He’s just 3-4 with one of those wins coming against a J.J. Wolf who has been awful in 2024.

Now shifting from the faster clay in Houston to the slower stuff in Monte Carlo, things could get worse for the 30-year-old former collegiate player.

Giron is a hard-court player through and through and his success on clay last year was mostly situational. For starters, he scheduled intelligently. Two of his tournaments were played at altitude and two of the fast clay events on the calendar were in Madrid and Geneva. Another was on the fast clay in Houston and a fourth was in Munich where play has always been a bit quicker than the slower tournaments like Rome, Monte Carlo, and the French Open.

Even the individual wins came against a struggling Challenger Tour guy in Emilio Gomez, a clay-hating Alexander Bublik (having covered that match, it was obvious the Kazakh tanked it), a lethargic and seemingly fatigued Hamad Medjedovic, a struggling Challenger guy in Alexander Ritschard and an underpowered Roberto Carballes Baena.

There’s very little to like about his game on clay and his experience doesn’t make it seem like he enjoys the surface either.

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Zhizhen Zhang vs Marcos Giron H2H – Stat of the Match

There haven’t been any matchups between these two in the last five years (I’m going to put absolutely no stock in the 2017 ITF Tour hard-court match they played – even if there was a mental edge, I highly doubt either of these guys even remembers the match).

The data on this match is why the price point is so close. Giron’s 2023 main tour statistics (hold plus break percentage and service points won plus return points won) are better than Zhang’s on clay, but that includes a lot of stat padding against the tanking Bublik, ill Medjedovic and erratic Jiri Lehecka. It’s not fair to take away a player’s best results from their overall data, but when the success is almost entirely because of the opponent’s poor play and nothing they did, I do like to see what the numbers look like with those matches removed. When one does that, his stats are as subpar as one would expect.

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