If he has something between his eyebrows, it rarely escapes Carlos Alcaraz, who takes to the court at night knowing he already has the ticket to the semi-final in his pocket – guaranteed at four in the afternoon by Alex de Minaur’s 7-6(3) and 6-3 against Taylor Fritz – and takes the package complete. As he said four days ago: “Why not?” The pass is great news, but it can still be better. Much better. Finishing first in the group and avoiding an overtaking by Jannik Sinner in Saturday’s final is a bigger reward, and an even bigger one is still within reach if he pulls it off and gets a third win: yes, he officially ends the year on top. It’s the second time. They are eleven months in total, closed with the 6-4 and 6-1 (after 1 hour and 23 minutes) of the column.
This Friday, at lunchtime, you will receive the trophy certifying your new success. He ultimately prevails over Sinner – his match with Ben Shelton is irrelevant – and will finish the course with 1 on his back. He will defend it at least until the Australian Open. He expresses himself happy, but sober. It didn’t end here. “At the beginning of the year I saw it very far away, because Jannik won all tournaments. However, since the middle of the season I have focused on this goal because I was able to show a high level in every tournament. I am very proud,” he says. He took command again in New York in September and won’t let go until at least the end of January. On Saturday at the penultimate station he will meet Alexander Zverev or Felix Auger-Aliassime. He happily kicks a ball.
City of football, Turin, with the Comuale overlapping the Inalpi Arena and the romantic memory of The Grande Torinoa dream destroyed by the Superga air tragedy. Today Juve’s haughty pose dominates, despite Alessandro del Piero, the symbol black and white He likes it as one more: he was from that school too. They called him Pinturicchio out of genius, so you can enjoy Musetti’s whippings and Alcaraz’s inexhaustible imagination from the stands. The Murcian was delicate in that cut volley, very involved in the field, in the impulse approach that is achieved in a few shots, punishing each other quickly. “Keep going, keep going!” Samuel López urges him. “Good work!” appreciates Juan Carlos Ferrero.
“Lo-ren-zo, Lo-ren-zo!”, the stands cheer the local tennis player, to see if in this way he raises his chin again, a gesture now of circumstance. Musetti lost the first set after doing the difficult thing: he responded to the lob with a glimpse of his backhand, but with the next maneuver the ball ended up in the corridor. And Alcaraz roars. He’s got it close. Tight. “Come on, come on, we have to stay there!” Listen to the directive of El Palmar and strike, err or err. It won’t be easy for the Italian, while his compatriot Matteo Berrettini, very attentive, reproduces the number one’s gesture for his teammate: “See? Do it like this, bang!” That lightning-fast twist of the elbow and wrist to unlock the shot.
Constant friction
At that point, the faces say not many trust their player to turn the story around. Musetti down, Alcaraz up. The one from Carrara, who arrived in Turin one and a half meters before the holidays, besieged by the resignation of Novak Djokovic, begins to lose his tank and his rival continues to compete hungry, determined. The bite (3-1 break) seems definitive, even if the transalpine pushes hard (two options from break) and counterattacks. Nothing, water. For him there is no return. The cut serves preclude the possibility of him re-committing and falling. There is a favorable return: De Minaur will be the second semi-finalist.
Alcaraz wins, wins the ticket and definitively becomes number one in a year in which the competitive frictions between him and Sinner were constant. The fight was wonderful, from power to power and with only one respite: between February and May, when the Italian was forced to remain in reserve due to the punishment linked to clostebol. Sighs of relief on your part, because it was initially two years. The Spaniard took advantage of this to gain ground and consolidate his hegemony on clay, even if at Roland Garros everything was in balance and the climax arrived. Who knows how everything would have happened later, if San Candido had transformed one of those three championship balls.
He didn’t, even though just a month later he redeemed himself at Wimbledon, where almost nothing was discussed about the result. That afternoon, Sinner launches dizzying balls from the baseline and the Murcian: “He’s much better than me!” – couldn’t keep up with him, but won two months later, at Flushing Meadows. There, another swerve and the most dominant version of the Spaniard, straight east, serious and focused, an all-round champion; without any cracks and, once again, on top. Perfection? “It doesn’t exist, but perhaps you can touch it,” he commented at the New York meeting with this newspaper, aware of not losing refinement in the final autumn display.
It all began on that trail, the overwhelming power on which he had ascended the throne three years earlier, when he was just 18 and told the world that he was there, that he had truly arrived, that he was as precocious and downright cheeky and as good as he was presumed to be. It wasn’t a bluff. “I want to sit at the table of the best in history,” he warned in his documentary (Carlos Alcaraz: My way). He’s not taking the wrong path, it’s his style. “He chose the hardest path,” says Andre Agassi, who is certainly right. Audacity and imagination. Compete? Also. This Alcaraz is not the exclusively instinctive boy of before, with a kamikaze touch. It comes close to everything.
Carlos Alcaraz
against
Lorenzo Musetti
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