A Caja Mágica covered with a retractable roof due to the rain and with 5,000 spectators in the stands attended

Alexander Zverev's

second victory

at the Mutua Madrid Open. Champion of the tournament in 2018, the German, number six in the world, profited from the inexperience of

Matteo Berrettini

in appointments of this scale and won 6-7 (8), 6-4 and 6-4, in two hours and 40 minutes , to claim his fourth Masters 1000, the fifteenth title of his career and second this season after winning in Acapulco. Zverev culminates an extraordinary week in which he has beaten three

top ten

players consecutively

:

Rafael Nadal

, world number two and emperor of the earth for three decades;

Dominic Thiem

, fourth in the rankings, which he surpassed in the semifinals;

and his opponent in the final, who started as number ten but will move up one place this Monday despite the defeat.

Without playing the best of their games, the Hamburg team took oil from Berrettini's restlessness when he dominated the game and served with four equals, giving up the service with a double fault.

Nothing was the same for the brave

Azzurro

player

,

surpassed at the last minute by the size of the match, his first final in a tournament of this category.

Zverev, sixth in the rankings, then found the confidence that he had lacked throughout the final, where he was passive and was often overwhelmed by his opponent's meteoric right hand.

Crucial double fouls

A surprising decision by the German tipped the hard-fought first set on Berrettini's side. With eight equal in the tiebreaker, three set points in the middle, a 5-0 lead for the Italian and a set option for Zverev, he played a second serve as if it were a first, double faulted and awarded the fourth and ultimately final option to his rival, which he defined with the service.

The Roman played his tricks better. Great servers both, the question was whether Berrettini would prevail with his forehand or if he would suffer with the backhand, inferior to that of his opponent. More determined, the Italian was the first to break, in the seventh game, although he would immediately let his advantage slip away. It was he, however, who was more reliable, managing to open his forehand thanks to his good leg mobility and thus dominate quite a few points. The backhand cut allowed him to hold when he could not command in the exchanges.

It was an intense, singular final, between two men close to two meters who do not respond to the stereotype of the clay tennis player, both comfortable in the altitude of the city. Interestingly, the double faults had a determining influence. Seven committed Zverev; only one his adversary, but with a lethal weight for him in the outcome. Lost the second set, he did not find his place on the court again, giving life to a hesitant player until then, who easily won the final set.

The pandemic and the increasingly selective trend of the

Big Three

when choosing its calendar have led to four finals with protagonists of the so-called

NextGen

in the last Masters 1000:

Medvedev

beat Zverev last fall in Paris-Bercy,

Hurkacz

to

Sinner

in Miami,

Tsitsipas

to

Rublev

in Monte Carlo and Zverev to

Berrettini

in Madrid.

Something begins to move in tennis, with the progressive emergence of players born after 1995. It remains to be seen, however, if any of them will be able to interfere in the fight for the greats, as Thiem did, in an also anomalous US Open.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

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