London, Jun 20 (EFE) at Queen’s.
The Murcian, who was making his debut at the London club after three days of training, needed a set and a half to acclimatize to the surface and to decipher the game of his rival, the tall and aggressive Rinderknech, who went to the net more than 70 times and he did not stop putting Alcaraz in trouble.
The number two in the world had imagined a completely different game, since in his head the rival was going to be the teenager Arthur Fils, who got out of the tournament two hours before the start of the game and allowed Rinderknech to enter as a ‘lucky loser’ ‘.
The change of rival was not insignificant, since it meant the arrival on the scene of Rinderknech, a server with more cachet and who had had the bad luck of running into Grigor Dimitrov in the last round of the qualifying round, who won on these slopes in 2014.
Alcaraz already knew what it was like to win the Frenchman, in a completely different context -US Open 2021- and even then it had been a puzzle and had taken a set from him. Now the situation was very different, with an acclaimed Alcaraz on the track and as a super favorite against a Rinderknech who had no support or on his bench, completely deserted.
But this for Alcaraz was not a formality, it was a fight against the surface and against the direct game of his rival. After six games of scoring and understanding that it was not going to be a walk through the field, Alcaraz wasted three break points and the derailment began. The Murcian played four unforced errors in a row in the eighth game and gave away his serve.
The Frenchman, unaccustomed to heroics, trembled, having the set before him, and was not able to close, returning the favor to an Alcaraz who, after hooking three winning returns to break his rival’s serve, returned to deliver the yours.
The grass tour began with fright, now it remained to be deciphered if it was also with drama. It is what this surface has; two misses and the set is lost. The room for maneuver was still great, because Alcaraz’s tennis was far from his usual rhythm, but either the Frenchman opened windows with his service, or the shipwreck would be irremediable.
Thus the fence tightened. Take after take, Alcaraz ran out of options to scratch a ‘break’. Until with 5-4 in favor of the Frenchman, he was three points away from winning the game. Maximum tension that Alcaraz released with a service that tripped the Frenchman and made him fall to the ground.
He wasn’t damaged, but he did lose concentration. He lost the next three games and the match found a balance in which Alcaraz, by head, had the chance to win. The effervescence of the Frenchman had been diluted and even he was seen to lose.
He was about to go completely by conceding 15-40 as soon as the final set began, but his serve caught him by the chest and brought him back into the game. It was a confident rebound for the Frenchman, who, for the second time in the match, broke Alcaraz’s serve and set off the alarms again. He no longer needed ‘breaks’, with holding four services he would have the first victory against a ‘top 10’ of his career. But that was a lot of pressure and Alcaraz resurfaced.
From 0-2 it went to 2-2 and the game was completely balanced. Rinderknech saved two breaking balls, Alcaraz a 15-30… Everything headed for the ‘tie break’, the most logical outcome.
And there, the sanity of Alcaraz prevails. The Murcian hit the tiebreaker at the first point, with a spectacular exchange that he resolved by skidding on the ground, and he no longer lost the advantage. In just over two and a half hours, he wrapped up his fifth victory on this surface, his first outside of Wimbledon.
With this victory, Alcaraz, who will face Jiri Lehecka in the second round, keeps alive the hope of reaching number one at Wimbledon. He will need four more wins to wrest the title from Djokovic.
Manuel Sanchez Gomez