Moutet opens his Moroccan campaign in style
In the dry heat of the ATP 250 in Marrakech, Corentin Moutet produced more of a statement than a warm-up.
Across the net was local favourite Taha Baadi, riding the buzz of his first win on the main tour.
The crowd wanted a scrap, a spark, a story to tell. Moutet gave them none of that. He delivered a match with no suspense, clean and cold.
Final score: 6-0, 6-2 in 1h04, a blunt little message sent to the rest of the draw.
A suffocating start
No feeling-out period. No niceties. From the first game, Moutet set the pace, mixing high, looping balls with early ball-striking, as if he meant to shut Baadi in a room with no windows. The break came at once, almost on autopilot.
In the next game, the Moroccan briefly hit back with three winning volleys that got the court buzzing.
But even that tiny uprising barely lasted a breath. At 40-40, he cracked, and Moutet was 3-0 up before anyone had really settled. The pecking order had been set, clearly.
The Moroccan forces it, the Frenchman cruises
Pushed to the limit, Baadi tried to make up the gap by swinging for the fences.
On clay, though, against a player who reads the game like Moutet, forcing it usually just means falling apart.
The forehand errors piled up, like grit in a gearbox already on the edge.
At the other end, Moutet kept dropping in one delicate shot after another, sometimes brilliant, sometimes a bit needless, but always a sign he was in complete control.
Another break, a love hold, and the first set was done and dusted: 6-0, no fuss.
A second set with a bit more life
The second set finally gave us a few tighter exchanges, with both players forced to cover every inch of the court.
Baadi showed heart, hunger, even a touch of pride. But Moutet snuffed out every hint of resistance with a gorgeous backhand pass down the line, struck as Baadi slid through the clay and ended up on the deck, helpless as the ball sailed away.
From there, the Frenchman simply kept pressing where it hurt. His serve, nothing special, was enough to keep his man at arm’s length.
He even sprinkled in a few serve-and-volley points, just to widen the gap in craft a little further.
Baadi still managed to hold serve twice, enough to earn a decent round of applause.
But the result had been settled for ages. The only real flicker of concern came in Moutet’s final game, a slightly scruffier one, a bit ragged around the edges.
Nothing serious. The Frenchman closed it out with the same calm he’d shown all match.
A tricky next test already looms
A place in the semi-finals now puts Moutet up against Argentine Marco Trungelliti, who knocked out Kamil Majchrzak.
He’s a strange one. Unpredictable. The sort of player who can turn a match into a headache if you let him get his rhythm.
But if Moutet keeps this level of control, with the same mix of touch and variation, he’ll keep moving.
This wasn’t just a good start. It was a message. In Marrakech, he hasn’t come to make up the numbers.
He’s come to leave a mark.
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