Malaysian Open Betting: Back a pair of big-priced outsiders

Events / Sean Calvert / 26 September 2011 /

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Bernard Tomic is a class act

"Tomic's big-hitting style should suit the quicker courts and there’s no reason he can’t go deep this week. The same applies to Bogomolov Jr, who’s in with a chance if he can get past Baghdatis in the first round."

The market leaders do not convince Sean Calvert this week who picks out three long shots who could go deep in Kuala Lumpur

It was another successful week of tipping for this column in Metz, as my man Ivan Ljubicic stormed through to the final of the Moselle Open.

Backed at a high of [8.8], the Croatian made the championship match having held serve on 34 consecutive occasions and was available to lay at [2.6] ahead of the final.

The ATP Tour moves on to the Asian swing for the next few weeks and the two events on offer starting on Monday take place in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur - both ATP 250 tournaments.

Which begs the question, what is Andy Murray - a man who couldn't be more vocal in his moaning about the players being overworked - doing playing in a non-mandatory ATP 250 event in Bangkok?

This is the same Andy Murray who is talking about potentially striking over the tour calendar and the same Andy Murray who said he was exhausted after Davis Cup last week.

With a paltry 250 ranking points on offer in Bangkok (Murray is almost 3,000 points ahead of fifth placed David Ferrer) and no points to defend from the corresponding week last year, there is no good reason other than money for him to be playing in week 39.

Roger Federer has announced that he won't be playing in the Shanghai Masters 1000 in a couple of weeks in order to rest (and neither will Novak Djokovic) and surely Murray has shot himself and his fellow rebels in the foot by turning up unnecessarily in Bangkok this week.

His presence makes the betting a tad askew as well, as the Scot is around [1.8] to win the PTT Thailand Open and I won't be touching that, with Murray a strong retirement possibility at some point in the tournament.

Instead, I'm concentrating on the Malaysian Open, which has also been hit by the withdrawals of Tomas Berdych and defending champion, Mikhail Youzhny.

This makes it a wide-open betting heat and at the head of the market are two Serbs - one without a tour level tournament win his whole career and another who's in awful form.

Janko Tipsarevic has played 165 ATP events without holding a trophy aloft and has only ever reached four finals, so although he's much-improved lately and inside the top-20 in the rankings, he's not one to back at [5.5] for this.

Tipsy's Davis Cup team mate, Viktor Troicki, is second favourite at around [6.5], but his recent record is woeful, and his often brittle confidence must be low, so I'll be avoiding him too.

The others at the head of the market look like ones to avoid too, with the likes of Jurgen Melzer, Marcos Baghdatis and Nikolay Davydenko all around the [10.0] mark and all are well below their best and have been pretty much all season.

The number one seed is Nicolas Almagro, but this event is played on indoor carpet, which should be a bit too pacy a surface for the Spaniard, who has only ever played four ATP events on carpet.

His best effort has been a quarter-final in Lyon back in 2006 and I'm not entirely sure why he's playing here this week.

The four finalists in week 39 last year were Andrey Golubev, Jarkko Nieminen, Guillermo Garcia-Lopez, and Youzhny and I can see a similar random outcome in 2011.

I think the best play in the Malaysian Open is to take a big priced player from each half of the draw on a back-to-lay basis and two that I think have a shout are Bernard Tomic and Alex Bogomolov Jr at [26.0] and [40.0] respectively.

Tomic has shown that he can play to a very high level when he feels like it and after a thrashing from Marin Cilic at the US Open, the young Aussie upped his game in Davis Cup against Roger Federer and Stan Wawrinka - getting a win over the latter.

His big-hitting style should suit the quicker courts and there's no reason he can't go deep this week. The same applies to Bogomolov Jr, who's in with a chance if he can get past Baghdatis in the first round.

The American has had by far the best season of his career this year at the age of 28 and he's actually ranked 20 places higher than the Cypriot, who has had a dreadful year.

Bogomolov Jr has wins over Murray and Tsonga in 2011 and if he does beat the Bagman, there's an opening in the draw in Melzer's quarter waiting for him.

Another to consider is the in-form Denis Istomin, who's a big priced [44.0] and has won his last three Challengers in a row (and retired in the final in a fourth).

He's beaten Troicki before and could be the one to watch in the Serb's quarter of the draw.

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