At the beginning of the week 32 men arrived in London to compete for the Aegon Championships and now just two remain as Marin Cilic will meet Feliciano Lopez for the title in the final at Queens Club on Sunday afternoon.
Cilic will be competing in his third final on this Centre Court while Lopez is in his second final so both men will be well rehearsed in the big day so they can have all their eyes on the prize as they say.
Marin Cilic
The big Croat has probably been the best player so far this week. Critics of his would say he hasn’t beaten anything and that he has had an easy draw to make it this far but he knocked off last week’s Ricoh Open winner Gilles Muller in the semi-final on Saturday so that is nonsense as far as I am concerned.
Cilic heads into this final having only lost 11pts on his first serve in the entire tournament which is a crazy statistic. It is not just his serve which has been firing though. He has been returning well and when he has been in the rallies he has been aggressive and not giving his opponent any time to prepare for shots.
Feliciano Lopez
The Spaniard is competing in his second final in as many weeks. He went down to Lucas Pouille in Stuttgart last week but has another chance for silverware here. If Cilic has had the easy route to the final then the veteran left hander has had just the opposite. He has taken out three seeds and faces a fourth here.
Lopez has lost his serve just once all week and that was in the second set with Grigor Dimitrov in the semi-final. That came immediately after a rain delay so that could almost be excused. Lopez has competed against the serve but his backhand appears to lack consistency when he tries to drive it which could be a concern.
Head to Head
These two have met seven times in their careers and Cilic holds a 5-2 lead. That record is 2-0 to Cilic on grass with the Croat winning in three sets when they met here last year. Their most recent meeting was at the French Open earlier this month when Cilic won a thoroughly one-sided contest.
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Betting
In terms of the match outcome I don’t need to bet on this final as I’m already on Cilic at 16/1 by virtue of backing him before a ball was struck this week. With that in mind I’m not going to go in again especially with the place part of the bet secured already.
I will take one bet for the final though and it might be quite obvious but I like over 24.5 games. If we go with the notion that the the Cilic vs Nalbandian final would have stayed as close as it was at the time the Argentine was defaulted then eight of the last 10 finals have gone over 24.5 games be it through two tight sets or three sets and I’ve got to think there won’t be much in the way of service breaks here.
Admittedly Cilic just battered Lopez but that was on clay. In their two meetings on grass Cilic has won 46 76 75 and 46 63 64 so that suggests we might get three sets. I wouldn’t be surprised if this follows the path the last final Lopez was in here followed. That went to three tiebreaks and this easily could too in a serve dominated contest. Whether it is two sets or three history and style suggests we’ll see a 25th game and possibly more.
Tips
WON – Back Over 24.5 games for a 4/10 stake at 1.90 with Bwin
Back it here:
