It is June 7, 2021. On the Philippe Chatrier field the eighth final of Roland Garros is staged between Novak Djokovic and Lorenzo Musetti. On paper there is no match: on the one hand the world number one and holder (up to that moment) of eighteen Grand Slam tournaments, as well as a myriad of other records, on the other a young man of high hopes who is climbing the world rankings.
The progress of the match, however, will tell us that the match took place. And how if there was. Musetti plays an ecstatic tennis for two sets, he looks like Federer in the best days, impresses with the quality and quantity of his shots, he doesn’t miss anything. Djokovic for two sets is annihilated, confused, he doesn’t know how to get out of the tennis cage imposed on him by his very young opponent. At 19, Lorenzo Musetti is living a dream.
A dream from which, however, he had to wake up abruptly. From the third set onwards, that tennis machine on the other side of the net begins to grind. The spell breaks. Djokovic in three sets leaves only one game to a Musetti emptied from a technical point of view and devastated from a physical point of view. So much so that – and it was a choice that was anything but appreciated – he even came to retire, at 0-4 in the fifth set.
From that day on, everything changed for Lorenzo Musetti from Carrara. In fact, since that 7th June, he hasn’t won a game anymore. Including the one against Nole, we are six consecutive defeats, on three different surfaces, most of them against players behind him in the standings (Musetti is currently number 58 in the world).
It is clear that something is not working. Far be it from us to make definitive judgments. We have also seen with Jannik Sinner that you cannot ask kids just over 18 to win everything immediately, to hold up mentally without having breaks, not to have empty passes. And in fact we don’t.
But we can try to analyze Musetti’s moment and what could have led him to this empty passage. After Roland Garros, in fact, there were two “facts” that could have negatively affected the last performances of the 2002 Tuscan class: the first is the maturity and the pause that had to be taken in preparing for the season on the grass, the second are it was the Olympics and the fact that he was unable to give continuity to his tennis in situations that were more comfortable for him.
Obviously we are not saying that Musetti should not have committed to obtaining the maturity or that we were wrong to chase the Olympic dream, God forbid. But the feeling is that when this guy loses pace, then he immediately pays the consequences. It had already happened last year after the injury suffered in Sardinia one step away from his first ATP final. From that moment on it went into crisis and only came out with the Acapulco exploit in March 2021.
Certainly there are technical, tactical and physical issues to face, and it is normal that this is the case given that we are talking about a 19-year-old boy who had never played an ATP tournament until last year. However the impression is that Musetti is one of those players who gains confidence just by playing: the more he plays, the more he gets into rhythm, the more he finds confidence, the more he wins. A virtuous circle that feeds itself.
Of course, he must also learn to manage passages in which he will inevitably play a little less, perhaps passages in which more defeats than victories will arrive. Also because at these levels balance is fundamental: one cannot think of always playing, much less always winning. Otherwise it is a moment to break the circle.
