Damm Serves a Stellar Performance to Wrap Up Blanchet in Brest Challenger

The indoor period in the tennis calendar benefits quite a few specific profile of players and America's Martin Damm is definitely one of them. Damm put on an immense serving display to beat France's Ugo Blanchet 6-4, 7-6 in the second round of the Brest Challenger.

I am going to unpack how the match unfolded and show just how tough it is for players to come near the Damm serve in these kind of quick conditions indoors. It is essentially what led the way to yet another great win this week for him.

Damm basically secures the only break of serve of the first set through a high-quality backhand cross-court that stays far too low for Blanchet to get anywhere near it. The American isn't really strong in any protracted exchange, but the flatness of his backhand in particular is something that can react well to slick indoor surfaces. This is a great example of just that.

Also what Damm was doing so well in the first set was that whenever he found himself slightly down in a service game he shut the Frenchman out all too easily. Successive lightning bolt serves bailing him out time after time. The issue for Blanchet was that the huge American was mixing up serve placement, types of serves and even proving hard to stop regardless of what return position Blanchet was taking up. There was not really much of a solution despite his attempts.

Looking at these two pieces of footage below, Damm is seemingly under a bit of pressure at 0-30 down in a service game at *4-3. If you look closely at Blanchet's movement when receiving, he predicts Damm's preferred location wrong on both occasions. During the first video, Blanchet is very concerned about the serve into his backhand purely out of how it had hurt him so much in the first few service games so he feels he has to prioritise that.

Then in this second video I feel he moves in that direction due to just how obvious the play is for Damm to look for regardless. The problem was not necessarily just the obvious difficulties of a big server hitting his spots to a vulnerable backhand full stop. It was about Damm being able to effortlessly mix his targets in every area of the service box.

The American ends up serving the set out really comfortably - it included one strong lefty swinger to generate an ace out wide, then contrasted with another ace in the deuce court, and then he earns another unreturnable to win the set quite easily. Here is Damm's set point below:

The serving dominance from Damm was maintained in the second set. In fact there was only one game in the second where Blanchet was able to get more than one return point in a return game. So with that being said, Blanchet did well to hang tough to a certain extent. I felt generally he was less prone to being rushed behind second serve points a lot less and he was creating his own offence quite confidently, but only in his own service games. There was not enough opportunity to get Damm to work from the back. Not only were grinding points out of the question, but Blanchet could not expose Damm's movement at all due to the level of serving taking place. Damm did not allow him to.

The second set tiebreak was fascinating as I was curious whether we would get the odd loose point from Damm that would change everything. Funnily enough, that is exactly what happened. Damm leaks a double fault to fall down 0-2 in the breaker and now the impetus was on Blanchet to hold his nerve.

Frustratingly for Blanchet, the tiny window of opportunity he had to gain leverage in the matchup was wiped out by an early backhand error just two points later. Damm makes the most of being back on level terms and essentially punishes Blanchet as a result. After a confident drive volley and a couple more dominant serves, Damm books his place into the Brest quarter-finals. Here is the match point:

Damm ended the match with 95% of first serve points won and faced absolutely zero break points. It marks the second match this week that the giant has not faced a break point. Now let's see if France's Clement Tabur has any more joy in the quarter-final. These two met in the Montpellier indoor courts earlier in the season and despite Damm winning 7-6 in the decider he stayed unbroken once again. These conditions are not too dissimilar either.

It is worth adding that Tabur has beaten an elite spot server at this very event this time last year. He beat Finland's Otto Virtanen and in that victory he won over 32% of 1st serve return points - this is comfortably over the tour average. Tabur will need to topple another monster of a server for the second year running. Over to you Clement...