Borges, and I'll take the unpopular side here. The head-to-head is 2-0 for Borges, including a win on hard, and the fresher man matters a lot in this one: Struff is 36, playing as a special exempt after a full week in Brussels (final), and yesterday he went three sets and two tiebreaks with Djokovic. That kind of win costs more than it gives back when you have to come back less than 24 hours later. Borges also arrives with a real scalp of his own, coming from a set down to beat Ruud, and his hard-court record over the last 12 months (17-13) is slightly better than Struff's (16-15).
The case for Struff is real, and most people see it: the Pronostics community is heavily on him (78% of predictors, 86% among the top 100), he's serving huge indoors, and his career record in these conditions is 111-81. If his legs are there, he can out-ace anyone in the draw. But I think the fatigue plus the H2H tips it. Borges in three sets, something like 6-4, 3-6, 7-6.
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Borges, and I'll take the unpopular side here. The head-to-head is 2-0 for Borges, including a win on hard, and the fresher man matters a lot in this one: Struff is 36, playing as a special exempt after a full week in Brussels (final), and yesterday he went three sets and two tiebreaks with Djokovic. That kind of win costs more than it gives back when you have to come back less than 24 hours later. Borges also arrives with a real scalp of his own, coming from a set down to beat Ruud, and his hard-court record over the last 12 months (17-13) is slightly better than Struff's (16-15).
The case for Struff is real, and most people see it: the Pronostics community is heavily on him (78% of predictors, 86% among the top 100), he's serving huge indoors, and his career record in these conditions is 111-81. If his legs are there, he can out-ace anyone in the draw. But I think the fatigue plus the H2H tips it. Borges in three sets, something like 6-4, 3-6, 7-6.