Musetti-Van Assche: a semifinal at stake
Lorenzo Musetti is the favorite in the Lyon quarterfinal against Luca Van Assche because in recent weeks his service games have held up even when the rest of his game wasn't clicking. Van Assche has only one route: stretch the rallies and the sets until his opponent starts missing. It worked against Valentin Vacherot. The only previous meeting says it can work against the Italian too.
How Van Assche turned the match against Vacherot
On Thursday Van Assche beat the number 3 seed 2-6, 6-4, 6-4. The first set lasted 40 minutes: Vacherot hit 7 aces with 89% of first serves in, and the set ended 6-2.
The match changed when Vacherot stopped finishing points with his serve. In the first game of the second set he made six unforced errors and lost his serve. He made 21 errors in the second set and 49 over the whole match. In the third set, Van Assche's decisive break came in the opening games.
Van Assche gets one more ball back, keeps the point alive and leaves the risk to his opponent. On the indoor hard court of the LDLC Arena, with the crowd behind him, the plan holds as long as the errors keep coming from the other side.
Musetti's serve and the missed break points
Musetti arrives with the opposite problem. The serve holds. In Shanghai he lost 7-6, 3-6, 7-6 to Zhou Yi, world number 277, without being broken once in the entire match.
In the third set of that match he had three consecutive break points and converted none of them, then the deciding tie-break went 7-1 to the Chinese player. Musetti didn't lose his serve and still lost the match: the problem was return conversion.
Against Van Assche that problem weighs more. An opponent who doesn't give away points forces Musetti to earn the break in the rally, and that is exactly where Van Assche built his comeback against Vacherot.
The Melbourne precedent
Their only head-to-head dates back to the second round of the 2024 Australian Open. Van Assche, then ranked number 79, won 6-3, 3-6, 6-7, 6-3, 6-0 in three hours and forty-nine minutes. Musetti led two sets to one and 3-2 in the fourth, then lost that set 6-3 and the fifth 6-0.
Van Assche won that match over the distance, as he did against Vacherot. In a best-of-three format the match is shorter, and that takes away part of the edge the fifth set gave him in Melbourne.
Musetti remains the favorite, with a slight edge. The serve secures his service games, and in Lyon, after Matteo Arnaldi, he beat Moïse Kouamé 6-4, 6-4.
The prediction falls apart if the match reaches a third set with Musetti still empty-handed on break points: that is where the French crowd and the Italian's physical resilience come into play, and at the US Open he lost to Dane Sweeny after winning the first set. The number to watch is Musetti's break point conversion in the first set. If he converts one early, the match stays short.
