Kei Nishikori makes his long and awaited French Open return and he will face Daniel Evans in the first round on Sunday, September 27th 2020 in what is going to be an extremely tight encounter. Will Nishikori get back to his strong form, especially on the clay, or will the British No.1 cause him some trouble?
Daniel Evans continues to struggle on clay, not being able to hit the ball as cleanly as he would like and just giving up matches as a result. The last two weeks Evans has lot both his first round matches in both Rome and Hamburg, to Hubert Hurkacz and to Stefanos Tsitsipas. If these matches were to be played on a hard court, they would’ve been much tighter, however, Evans is not a strong clay-court player. Evans has to drastically improve his performances on this surface if he is to make higher inroads into the rankings, but also into a lot of the tournaments themselves.
Kei Nishikori is a player who loves to play on clay, and he has shown some good performances in recent weeks, such as his victory against Albert Ramos-Vinolas at the Rome Masters last week. Nishikori is slowly but surely getting his game back up to speed, and we will definitely want him to be playing his best tennis, because when he is on top of his game, he is a scary player. Nishikori will be coming in here filled with confidence and just wanting to get a few wins under his belt, and if he plays like we know he can, there is no reason why he should not be able to.
This is going to be the 4th meeting between both players, with Kei Nishikori leading the head to head 2-1. These two players have not played each over in over 3 years and therefore the past head to head does not really matter at this point. What I think is the difference here is that Daniel Evans is just not as good as he should be on the red dirt. Nishikori, on the other hand, is very solid and he will be eager to get himself back into top form with a win here on Sunday. I’ll take Nishikori to win.