Federico Cina #178Italy00 – 2Alexandre Muller #136France2

Muller, 29, had gone months without a tour-level main-draw win, so his week in Chengdu began in qualifying rather than in the main draw. Converting that qualifying run into a 6-4 6-0 first-round win over Moïse Kouamé is his first main-draw victory at tour level since Marrakech, and it is the clearest recent evidence of where his game sits on hard courts, the surface he has played almost exclusively since the summer. The limitation is that his three Chengdu wins have come against opponents ranked outside the top 190, so the run has not yet tested him against a player near the top 100.

One previous meeting is a narrow sample, but the scoreline is one-sided: Cina won five games, and the match never reached a tiebreak or a deciding set. If that pattern repeats, Cina will be the one under pressure on serve early in each set. The counterweight is the sample itself — a single match from March 2026 cannot say much about how either player is serving this week.

Fourteen completed matches is a modest sample, but it is the fullest picture available for Muller and it is a losing one. It sits awkwardly alongside the head-to-head win and the 35-place ranking gap (135 to 170) that make him the favourite here. The most recent entry is 23 September 2026, so the record is current rather than stale, and it is the main reason this does not read as a mismatch.