Rarely in a tennis tournament, especially in a first round, are the stands bursting before the first point of the match. Seats tend to fill up at halftime after the first three games, when streams of people begin to stream into the stands and settle in as the players have already begun the battle. Only in the matches of a select few, including Carlos Alcaraz, no one wants to miss even one iota of the exhibition.
Suzanne Lenglen, an unknown clue until Monday for Alcaraz, discovered her talent with a hammer blow. The Spaniard uncovered a beating against Flavio Cobolli (6-0, 6-2 and 7-5) in one hour and 57 minutes and broke into Roland Garros through the front door.
A lot has already happened since Alcaraz and Cobolli met in August 2020, when the Spaniard was out of the top 300 in the world and the Italian was around 900. It was in the preliminary phase of a Challenger in Italy and already by then Alcaraz was left with the victory, which in that tournament began a season finale that made him finish the year close to the top 100.
Now, the difference between the two has widened even more, as confirmed by the overwhelming output of Alcaraz, who in fifteen minutes had already eviscerated the first four games and had left a play to remember with a shot from outside the net to close the 4-0.
With a devilish rhythm and before an opponent completely overwhelmed by the situation -he has barely played eleven ATP games-, Alcaraz donned the first set with a ‘donut’ in 25 minutes and made it clear that the first round was going to be little more than a Procedure. In fact, the Italian needed more than half an hour to have a chance to win his first game. With 6-0 and 2-0 for Alcaraz, Cobolli finally added something positive to his locker and aroused one of the great ovations of the afternoon.
The game accelerated Cobolli’s tennis several levels, who began to have a little more confidence in himself and cut the bleeding of errors that exceeded twenty in the middle of the second set. But neither could the transalpine perform miracles, who was also run over in the second set 6-2.
There Alcaraz had already lost a bit of explosiveness, as if the adrenaline of starting the tournament, of jumping to a new track and beginning the conquest of who knows if his first Roland Garros, had evaporated. Not enough to give him a scare, but enough for Cobolli to adjust to the circumstances and raise a more even game, in which Alcaraz always had the best card, with left shots and countershots that made his rival brace, asking for explanations from the fortune.
The Italian’s resistance lasted until 3-3, when Alcaraz broke and accelerated to 5-3, where he had three match points available to the rest. The Italian, the more he was on the edge, the better he played and saved them all, breaking Alcaraz’s serve for the first time and giving life to a set that the Spanish completely extinguished. He took the next two games and finally gave the final blow to the match and certified his landing on the French clay with a new display. His rival in the second round will be the Japanese Taro Daniel, whom the Murcian already defeated in the semifinals of a Challenger in Oeiras (Portugal) in 2021.
Djokovic does not fail either
Nor did Novak Djokovic fail in his debut, who knocked down the American Aleksandar Kovacevic 6-3, 6-2 and 7-6 (1) and will face the Hungarian Marton Fucsovics in the second round, whom he has won on the four occasions they have met. have measured.
As for the Spanish, Roberto Bautista passed the round against the Chinese Yibing Wu (7-6 (4), 6-1 and 6-1) and lost Albert Ramos, against Stan Wawrinka (7-6 (5), 6 -4, 6-7 (2), 1-6 and 6-4), and Bernabé Zapata, against Diego Schwartzman (1-6, 6-7 (5), 6-2, 6-0 and 6-4) . In the women’s draw, Aliona Bolsova, who entered as a ‘lucky loser’ due to casualties, defeated the Slovakian Kristina Kucova 6-2, 6-1.
2023-05-29 18:01:35
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