Lorenzo Sonego ousts defending champion Matteo Berrettini in Stuttgart

Last year's champion in Stuttgart, Matteo Berrettini is out of hte evnet in the first round getting smashed by compatriot Lorenzo Sonego 6-1 6-2.

This is a very surprising result because Berrettini is one of the best players on the Tour when it comes to grass but he hasn't played in a while before this match so that kind of makes sense. Berretini was superb at the event last year winning the trophy comfortably by beating Murray in the final.

This time around it was a quick loss which might not be a huge surprise but the score is. Berrettini doesn't generally lose this easily on grass because Sonego utterly destroyed him. He lost only 3 games on grass which is pretty unheard of. Sonego was spectacular as he can be serving really well. He only had 3 aces but many of his serves were unplayable for Berrettini though the Italian was able to force six break points. The trouble was that he didn't use a single one of them.

That was vastly different for Sonego who was able to use 4 of 6 break points he had as Berrettini really didn't serve well. He hit his serve only 57 % of the time and he had 11 unforced errors which was a bit too much considering it's grass. The second serve was a huge problem for the Italian as he won only 6 of 18 points after missing his first serve and Sonego's damage mostly came from that.

The match lasted 71 minutes and while it was good to see Berrettini back on the courts he'll need to do much better because next week he's the defending champion in Queen's Club and if he fails to defend that then his ranking will continue to slip. That's trouble ahead of Wimbledon.