Andrey Rublev went into Wimbledon with a warning sign attached to his name: one grass-court match, one loss, and a first-round draw that looked less like a reset than a test. A betting preview for Monday, June 29, at the All England Club in London backed Roman Safiullin to cover +3.5 games and to win outright against the world No. 13.
That recommendation mattered because Rublev had not built a grass-court rhythm before the tournament began. His only warmup match ended in a 6-3, 6-2 loss to Hubert Hurkacz, while Safiullin arrived after six grass matches and three qualifying wins. The numbers pointed in opposite directions: Rublev carried the ranking, but Safiullin carried the recent grass-court work, which is often the sharper guide on this surface.
The case for Safiullin was not just that he had been busy. He also came through qualifying without dropping a match, and the preview said his big baseline game could make life awkward for Rublev over five sets. At +163 at bet365, Safiullin was framed as the live side to risk 0.5 units on the moneyline, a sign that the matchup was being treated as more than a routine top-20 opener.
That is the friction in this one. Rublev was the higher-ranked player and still the more established name, but he reached Wimbledon with only a single grass-court outing behind him, and it was a one-sided defeat. Safiullin, ranked No. 127, had already logged enough matches on grass to look settled, and the preview treated that difference as enough to tilt the first-round line against Rublev despite the ranking gap.
For Rublev, the immediate question was not whether he belonged at Wimbledon. It was whether one grass match before the sport’s biggest grass-court event had given him enough to survive a dangerous opener. If he did not solve Safiullin quickly, the path he drew at the All England Club in London would already be looking tighter than the seeding suggested.
