{"id":56488,"date":"2023-05-05T17:21:09","date_gmt":"2023-05-05T21:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/?p=56488"},"modified":"2023-05-05T17:21:09","modified_gmt":"2023-05-05T21:21:09","slug":"atp-madrid-final-prediction-alcaraz-struff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2023\/05\/05\/atp-madrid-final-prediction-alcaraz-struff\/","title":{"rendered":"ATP Madrid Final Prediction: Carlos Alcaraz vs Jan-Lennard Struff"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>We have quite an unexpected final at the ATP Madrid Masters&#8211;well, half of it is very unexpected, at least. Carlos Alcaraz&#8211;the best player in the world, save perhaps Novak Djokovic and a healthy Rafael Nadal&#8211;reached the final, as expected. He surprisingly dropped his first set of the tournament to Emil Ruusuvuouri, but has won ten straight since. Jan-Lennard Struff, meanwhile, entered the main draw as a lucky loser (and remember, with a 96-player draw, lucky losers are even lower-ranked than usual). He has three comeback victories in the process of this event, and a stunning upset of <a href=\"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/2022\/12\/03\/stefanos-tsitsipas-delusions-of-grandeur\/\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_self\">Stefanos Tsitsipas<\/a>. Can he pull off one more?<\/p>\n<h2>ATP Madrid Final Prediction<\/h2>\n<h4>Carlos Alcaraz vs Jan-Lennard Struff<\/h4>\n<p>Quite honestly, it doesn&#8217;t seem fair to expect this to be close. Alcaraz is a better player, especially on clay. Struff, meanwhile, is in the biggest match of his life&#8211;the German has never been in a situation anything at all like this. In fact, Struff has never been in any Tour-level final in his career, let alone a Masters final against one of the elites of the game.<\/p>\n<p>Fans deserve a great match, but it&#8217;s hard to imagine it&#8217;s likely. The Spaniard is just plain better, and he&#8217;s much more used to occasions like this. Even if Struff plays as well as he&#8217;s played the rest of this tournament so far, it would still take a near-miracle for him to upset Alcaraz. Expect the Spaniard to defend his title, and move very close to re-taking the World #1 ranking.<\/p>\n<p><a id=\"Q2ObhMbZSM9mj2BYhgeZXQ\" class=\"gie-single\" href=\"http:\/\/www.gettyimages.com\/detail\/1487819177\" target=\"_blank\" style=\"color:#a7a7a7;text-decoration:none;font-weight:normal !important;border:none;display:inline-block;\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Embed from Getty Images<\/a><script>window.gie=window.gie||function(c){(gie.q=gie.q||[]).push(c)};gie(function(){gie.widgets.load({id:'Q2ObhMbZSM9mj2BYhgeZXQ',sig:'nSZSdXshgrfUB-vib3TI_jvNFA42jn8voJfYeWDTHac=',w:'594px',h:'396px',items:'1487819177',caption: true ,tld:'com',is360: false })});<\/script><script src='\/\/embed-cdn.gettyimages.com\/widgets.js' charset='utf-8' async><\/script><\/p>\n<p><em>Prediction: Alcaraz in 2<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Main Photo Credit: Susan Mullane-USA TODAY Sports<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We have quite an unexpected final at the ATP Madrid Masters&#8211;well, half of it is very unexpected, at least. Carlos Alcaraz&#8211;the best player in the world, save perhaps Novak Djokovic and a healthy Rafael Nadal&#8211;reached the final, as expected. He surprisingly dropped his first set of the tournament to Emil Ruusuvuouri, but has won ten [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1601,"featured_media":55067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[15673,12813,4657,5729,15513,4224,15612,5748,2373,2369],"class_list":["post-56488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-predictions","tag-atp-madrid-predictions","tag-atp-picks","tag-atp-predictions","tag-carlos-alcaraz","tag-carlos-alcaraz-predictions","tag-jan-lennard-struff","tag-jan-lennard-struff-predictions","tag-mutua-madrid-open-predictions","tag-tennis-picks","tag-tennis-predictions"],"modified_by":"Yesh Ginsburg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1601"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}