The ATP Challenger in Morelos is a special one. It's played in high altitude, about 2000 meters above sea level, so the conditions are amongst the quickest on tour. In the three previous years, it was won by Matias Franco Descotte, Dennis Novikov and Alexander Bublik. All of them rather like fast courts. Dudi Sela and Sebastian Ofner are this year's top seeds, but the first match I preview is the one between unseeded players Jose Hernandez-Fernandez and Skander Mansouri.
Dominican Dropping Level
As mentioned, I will look for good hard court players this week to oppose the few clay courters sneaking into the field. Now Hernandez-Fernandez doesn't play well exclusively on clay, but you can still put him in that category. Despite winning 58% on hard courts over the course of his career, his trend is pointing downwards. He's 9-14 over the last 24 months and also lost his most recent hard court match against #891 Billy Harris.
Talented Tunisian
Simply fading the Dominican would be a bit too easy, but his opponent, 24-year-old Tunisian Skander Mansouri, is a talented player. He was a top 50 junior before choosing to play college tennis for the university of Wake Forest which he led to their first ever National Championship in 2018.
Mansouri is a good server at 6'4" (1.93m) and has an ace rate of around 10% throughout his career. In comparison, Hernandez-Fernandez only serves an ace 2.8% of the time. Not only does the tall Tunisian have the surface advantage, he also steadily raises his level. After winning five titles on the ITF tour last year, he finally gets into bigger tournaments. He only lost to Yosuke Watanuki in both the Newport Beach and Cleveland Challenger events and even made the third round last week when he beat Goncalo Oliveira and Dmitry Popko before losing to eventual runner-up Watanuki.
On the contrary, Hernandez-Fernandez played another clay ITF event in Naples last week where he lost to Evan Zhu in round two. With the better serve, the altitude becoming a factor and the Tunisian being in better form, trying to establish himself on the Challenger tour, I'm siding with the up-and-coming player here.
