The Halle and Queen’s tournaments will be staged next week. While in Halle we will witness the challenges of world number one Jannik Sinner and several Top Ten players, the London tournament featuring the newly crowned Roland Garros winner (and defending tournament champion) Carlos Alcaraz, the number one seeded seed, does not fare badly.
The Spaniard is the big favorite for the event, which does not have many Ten but several tennis players after the 10th position. Alcaraz will make his debut against Cerundolo, definitely not a surface specialist and not a very complicated match given the surface.
Intriguing, however, is the possible second-round match against Draper, someone who has grown up on grass and can bring big pitfalls. On the other side of the scoreboard the number two seed Alex De Minaur will start the tournament against Lorenzo Musetti, author of a good test in Stuttgart but definitely not favored on this surface.
Two Italians in the tournament, Musetti and Matteo Arnaldi who instead is at the top and will face Ugo Humbert in the first round. In short, not an easy slate for the Italians in the tournament, both here and in Halle. Among the first-round matches intrigues the one between Milos Raonic and Cameron Norrie while Russian Khachanov will face Sebastian Korda, the other Americans Taylor Fritz, Ben Shelton and Frances Tiafoe will face first-round qualifiers and there is curiosity about who their opponents will be.
Carlos Alcaraz leads Queen’s seeding
Carlos Alcaraz is already focused on the grass court tour, after a few days of vacation after winning Roland Garros. And in his first match at Queen’s, a tournament where he is defending his title and 500 points, he will face Francisco Cerúndolo. Normally, before playing against your next opponent you don’t want him to see a minute of your training and, however, Alcaraz and Cerúndolo have practiced together on the centre court of the English tournament the day before they face each other.
The reason is that said training was already scheduled before the draw and the great friendship that unites them has meant that they don’t mind training together.