It wasn’t meant to be for Marin Čilić against Canadian Felix Auger-Aliassime Monday afternoon in Melbourne. The Croatian came out crisp and took the first set 6-2 before losing the next three sets in consecutive fashion; two in tiebreaks. Regardless, Čilić should consider this chapter of the Australian open a success as he took down #5 Andrey Rublev in the 3rd Round. Čilić will climb three spots in the world rankings due to reaching the 4th Round of the Australian Open this year.
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33 year-old Marin Čilić looked to be cruising into the twilight of his tennis career in recent tournaments. With his world ranking remaining in the top-50, he would regularly win a match or two before bowing out in the first week of Grand Slam tournaments.
But with Čilić’s HUGE win over world #5 Andrey Rublev two days ago, we may not be done with the 2014 US Open champion quite yet.
Monday afternoon in Melbourne (10PM ET) Sunday night in North America, Čilić will face 21 year-old Canadian Félix Auger-Aliassime, who is ranked #9 at the Australian Open this year. This would be Auger-Aliassime’s first quarterfinal appearance down under if he could beat Čilić, who played against Federer in the 2018 final.
Čilić is 3-0 all time versus Félix Auger-Aliassime; last beating him 7-6, 6-3 in 2021 on grass in the Stuttgart final and has only dropped one set to the Canadian thus far.
The key to the match was second set tie-breaker and poor serving by Cilic.
For the entire match he first serve was at 54 % which is poor. During the second set tie-breaker he did not have one first serve while FAA had 5 aces. Similar story in 4th set tie – breaker.
Still this was a huge improvement from Cilic. Last 2-3 years his form and confidence has been down and his ranking in a free fall.
Do we cheer on Auger-Aliassime because he’s probably going to marry a Croatian chick?
This was the worry, i said it in the other threat, after playing such a high intensity high level match you come down in the next one. Sigh.
He ran out of gas and got in his head. He’s done this a million times where he’s better than the other guy and gets off his game. Still a successful tournament for him. We’re talking about Cilic in the 2nd week of a Grand Slam. Case and point.
Only the 20th player in the history of the sport to make 25 grand slam second weeks, he is ahead of Goran and all the others easily.
He played terrible. First set he was hitting the ball off the planet. Sets 2-4 were filled with way too many errors. He’s too inconsistent with his play. He can beat the #6 player in the world but not the #9 where he has beaten 3 times before. I don’t think cilic will ever win a major again.
It’s worth mentioning we want Cressy to beat Medvedev also which is going on at the same time.
As i said Ante, i dont think he has good chances… but the H2H is 3-0 to Cilic so u u never know. Clearly he knows how to beat this guy. We’ll see. We’ll see. Either Way Marin has done well i think this tourney.
Iggy, FAA is -150 in Vegas. So he’s the slight betting favorite. We shall see. I’ll be watching this one start to finish. You?
It’s going good atm! LOL.. early stages though, looks like the first set belongs to Marin!
Creasy lost the first set 6-2 so it looks like cilic will play Daniel in the QF. Hope cressy can make a comeback
you never know Cressy might come back, he’s a big bopper. First time i’m going for an american in forever lmao