Not a soul on Center Court and it’s Monday, still far from the decisive tennis engagements of the weekend, and this is a round of 16 match.
What happens is that Carlos Alcaraz (20) plays.
Thousands of Londoners have alighted at Southfields stop to enter a promenade that runs between beautiful terraced houses, heading for the green lawns of Wimbledon, how envious some of us are now that our lawns are turning yellow, who knows if there aren’t there will be a step back in terms of the desertification of the Mediterranean.
Apart from the Londoners, hundreds of Italians also arrive in the British campaign. Wimbledon does not remember a similar deployment of transalpine journalists, there are many of them, people from the Gazzetta dello Sport or La Repubblica, and also from smaller digital ones. The Italian academy has rarely been seen like this, so inspired, overpopulated with talented tennis players, with enormous possibilities, as in the case of Jannik Sinner or Matteo Berrettini.
Between games, the Italian press talks in the press tribune, a nice corner in the stands full of green desks, comfortable and with diagonal views. The Italians are talking to each other and can’t believe it, since at 43 minutes their boy, Berrettini, has won the first set and Alcaraz seems to be half-throttled.
As he had suffered on Saturday against Nicolás Jarry, now the world number 1 suffers against Berrettini (27), today the 38th racket in the world, actually a deception, since his position in the ranking does not respond to his performance, but to the his recurring injuries, some of which are very recent.
Berrettini had his great moment two years ago, in the year of his explosion at Wimbledon: after beating a couple of good examples like Felix Auger-Aliassime or Hubert Hurkacz, the Italian had reached the final of the temple of tennis to give up only against Novak Djokovic.
And then?
Then Berrettini was a quarterfinalist at the US Open, once again a victim of the Serb, and, the following year, a semi-finalist at the Australian Open, now defeated by Nadal. Later he had fallen into a rosary of setbacks, the first covid and a surgery on his right hand and an abdominal tear this past winter, a succession of misfortunes that had slowed him down this year.
In other words, he has arrived at Wimbledon quietly, an outsider.
These days in London, the tennis world has talked a lot about Alcaraz, but not so much about Berrettini, and in silence it is how the Italian had progressed, always defeating notable rivals, first Sonego, then De Miñaur, in the third round Zverev, and suddenly he had burst into the Center Court in a state of grace, with the stage full to the brim and Juan Carlos Ferrero, Alcaraz’s coach, impassive in the box, with his cap, his hand to his mouth, fine as in the times when he played his best tennis.
Alcaraz takes those initial 43 minutes to get the measure of the big man that is Berrettini, as tall as Jarry, 1.96 m tall.
Alcaraz adapts to the match, moves the giant like a child when he shakes the tree so that the fruit falls. The drops are back, the rhythm changes.
And finally the Italian falters, he concedes in the second set and falters in the third: Alcaraz hardly misses anymore, impeccable against a prototype designed for tennis on grass, magnificent service by this Berrettini, tennis player of serve and volley , but not of resistance, precisely the challenge proposed by the Murcian.
It’s nine o’clock at night in London, it’s cool, there’s little light and they’ve closed the retractable roof because it’s raining, when Berrettini says enough, caught in Alcaraz’s tennis gale.
At that time of the day the Italian press is already thinking about Sinner, their other man in London (he faces Safiullin today), and Alcaraz is thinking about Rune, his next stone on the road, a different profile, nothing to see with Jarry or with Berrettini.
