Manuel Sanchez Gomez |
London (EFE) ) to play in the quarterfinals of the British Grand Slam for the first time in his career.
Buried between the power of the Italian, Alcaraz armed himself with patience to find the cracks in a man who had held the service sixty consecutive times and to whom the winning shots fell out of the pocket. With his cap thrown back, his unorthodox serving mechanics and his perennial clenched fist, Berrettini put Alcaraz between a rock and a hard place, but the Murcian, as so many times before, dodged the fire with a torrent of quality.
Alcaraz, from less to more
The Spaniard went from less to more, who was scared of losing the first set in a Wimbledon classic: the server saves all the break opportunities and takes advantage of the few he has in his favour. A headache that everyone who wants to go far at the All England Club has to go through.
The key is not to give up and endure the beating until the fruit is ripe enough to fall. Until Alcaraz’s first break, in the fourth game of the second set, Berrettini had saved all of his service turns in the tournament and defused all ten of his break balls.
Until Carlitos appeared to break the statistics and lower the Roman from the cloud, who gradually fell apart from a blow from Alcaraz on one side of the net. One of the contenders for the best shot of the tournament and that turned the moment of the match.
Alcaraz vibrated from him and Berrettini touched the grass. He had been in an oasis for several days, after a horrible season, and there were voices that put him as the only candidate for the final victory with the respect of Djokovic.
And Alcaraz was in charge of erasing those forecasts from the blackboard. The break was forged in a terrible game by the Italian, which began by relying on a ball that he let go and kissed the line. It helped the Murcian to see himself capable of knocking down the giant and the clean and neat punch of the Italian blurred.
Berrettini had a harder time keeping up with the Spaniard, who began to penetrate his backhand and melt his physique with long exchanges. This was the weak point of the man from Rome, whose bodywork had been in the mechanic for almost two months and now had to face four games in five days.
A lot of whipping, especially against the number one in the world, who after scoring the second set, had to sweat the fat drop to break Berrettini’s serve in the third. Five chances, in the same game, went away before clinching the sixth with a spike. His outburst of rage explained the importance of the moral blow.
game overturn
The game turned completely upside down, it was Alcaraz’s first advantage and with Berrettini melted down victory could not be escaped. The Italian ended up out of breath; Alcaraz, wanting more.
The example was the beginning of the fourth set, with Alcaraz ready on the court, walking from side to side, and Berrettini in the locker room, looking for solutions. The Murcian started with two consecutive double faults, but they were one of the few mistakes he made.
With a 4-3 break in favor on the scoreboard and already with the roof closed due to darkness in London, Alcaraz captured a victory that makes him the twelfth Spanish man in the Wimbledon quarterfinals and has already entered the top eight of three of the four Grand Slams, only Australia is missing.
His next rival will be the Danish Holger Rune, his generational opponent and who beat him in his only official match, when the Spaniard had to retire with an abdominal tear at the Masters 1,000 in Paris-Bercy.