Fognini Show's Flashes of Brilliance vs Molleker: Prediction vs Carreno Busta

Fabio Fognini yesterday put German teenager Rudolf Molleker in his place in front of his home crowd in Hamburg. Molleker put on an admirable display vs the Italian dynamite but eventually succumbed to Fognini's unstoppable backhand and unanswerable power.

Fognini who is a specialist at taking the ball early is one of the most gifted tennis players currently on the ATP tour. If he had the mentality of Rafa Nadal or David Ferrer as one commentator put it yesterday he would have produced so much more success throughout his career. Still it's great to see him playing his best tennis at 32 and given the way he plays he still has 3-4 years left to make a mark on the tennis world.

Molleker is almost half his age and although 150th in the world, played some decent tennis at times, but it didn't take the best performance from Fognini to win through. Whilst Fognini didn't show the best of patience to break Molleker he did see the job through in straight sets and hit 22 winners off his racket.

Today he will face a far greater challenge in the form of clay court specialist Carreno Busta who also beat a home favourite - Jay Lenard Struff in straight sets yesterday. While Busta is in good form on clay and Fognini has never beaten Busta in all 6 meetings the pair have had, I do still believe Fognini stands the better chance here. Particularly since Busta showed signs of weakness last week when losing to a very average Frenchmen Jeremy Chardy. If Fognini plays even at 70% of his capacity he will win this match and finally get on the score board head to head vs Busta.

Earlier this year when the pair met at the Australian Open, Fognini was comprehensively beaten by Busta 3-1 and by comfortable margins in each set. Busta is a classic rally player so it's not surprising that he's Fognini's nemesis. But then again so was Nadal earlier this year in Monte Carlo and we saw what Fognini did to him. I think he can do something similar to Busta today.

At 2.00 odds Fognini represents an excellent bet as well as his odds I wrote about yesterday at 10.00 to win the title in Hamburg.