On Thursday, March 10, the first Masters 1000 of the season starts in Indian Wells. The top seeds have been exempt from playing the first round so they will not take to the court until Saturday. Here we are going to analyze the options of the main candidates for the title.
tournament draw
tournament results
Daniil Medvedev
The newly released world number 1 will leave with a lot of pressure. Despite the absence of Novak Djokovic, he needs to reach at least the quarterfinals in order not to lose that first place. A priori he may seem like something very affordable but in his previous 4 participations he has never surpassed the round of 16.
In his debut he will face the winner of Alexei Popyrin vs Tomas Machac and then his main opponents before the quarterfinals would be the Frenchman Gael Monfils or the Spanish Carlos Alcaraz or Roberto Bautista. From there, the current champion Cameron Norrie and the Greek Stefanos Tsitsipas appear as the main threats before a hypothetical and expected semifinal against Rafa Nadal.
Reef Nadal
At 35 years old, the Spanish tennis player is completing the best start to the year of his entire professional career. He has already added the titles of Melbourne, Australian Open and Acapulco and if he continues with this dynamic we will soon have him fighting again for world number 1. In this 2022 he has 15 consecutive victories, he has not yet known defeat and here again he can continue to enlarge his legend since he is only one Masters 1000 away from equaling Novak Djokovic as the tennis player with the most titles in this category.
Of course, Rafa will have a very complicated path without any type of concession, so he will have to maintain the highest level if he wants to aspire to the title. He will debut against Sebastian Korda or Thanasi Kokkinakis and then he should meet Daniel Evans. In the round of 16, Reilly Opelka and Denis Shapovalov would be his main rivals. Once in the quarterfinals he could meet Jannik Sinner or Casper Ruud before the semis against Daniil Medvedev.
Alexander Zverev
The German has been the center of all the controversy in recent weeks due to the unfortunate incident that culminated in his disqualification from the Acapulco ATP. Here in Indian Wells he has never felt comfortable having reached the quarter-finals only once in his previous six appearances.. Last weekend in the Davis Cup we saw him much more focused, perhaps wanting to forget what happened in Acapulco and here in this event he has a very favorable picture to be able to be the protagonist and this time for tennis reasons.
He will debut against the winner of Tommy Paul vs. Mikhail Kukushkin and then Alex de Minaur, Taylor Fritz and Pablo Carreño appear as possible rivals before the quarterfinals. From there the level of demand would increase with Felix Auger, Marin Cilic or Matteo Berrettini. Fortunately for the German he has avoided Daniil Medvedev and Rafa Nadal so he is the favorite to reach the final.
Andrey Rublev
The Russian tennis player has been the great beneficiary of the absence of Novak Djokovic. He has been framed in the same room as the Serbian and therefore has managed to avoid all the possible bones of the circuit. He would not find Medvedev and Nadal until the hypothetical final and against Zverev, Auger and Berrettini until the semifinals.
If we analyze his fourth we have that to reach the semifinals his biggest rivals are Hubert Hurkacz or Aslan Karatsev who would also cross each other so he would only have to face one. Tiafoe, Schwartzman, Isner, Dimitrov and Bublik are the rest of the seeds in this quarter and against all of them the Russian would start as the clear favorite.
