Wednesday, November 13, 2024, 16:09
| Updated 4:32 p.m.
Carlos Alcaraz appeared this Wednesday on the Turin track with a nasal plaster and with just half an hour of training in two days. He was affected by the cold he’s been carrying since last week, but not overwhelmed. He needed to win his second match of the ATP Finals to avoid being left out of the masters tournament, and he did it, 6-3 and 7-6 (8), against Andrey Rublev, who continues to be mired in his mental inconsistency.
The Russian had a unique opportunity before him against a depleted Alcaraz and he let it slip away, because the Murcian was far from being 100%, especially at the beginning of the duel, when he was hasty and eager to finish the points quickly. After beating Rublev, on Friday, presumably in the night shift, Alcaraz will face Alexander Zverev for a place in the semifinals.
After canceling his training session on Tuesday after five minutes, alarms about Alcaraz’s continuity in the tournament went off, but Juan Carlos Ferrero silenced them. He assured that the Murcian would play without being completely well, which is the most normal thing for these professionals. You always have to play with pain sometimes.
For this reason, Alcaraz did not want to enter Rublev’s game of long exchanges, nor fall into the spider web in which he already fell in Madrid this year, his only defeat against the Russian and an oasis in the season of the Muscovite, who arrived at the match of Turin against the Spanish with four defeats in the last five games.
Alcaraz did not hide his problems to face his second match in the ATP Finals. “It could be better, I’m not going to lie to you,” he said after the meeting. The Spaniard relied on his serve, with which he connected ten direct serves and won 84% of points with firsts and also on the climbs to the net. He approached that area of the track on 24 occasions and took the point on 18 of them. «Service is a very important weapon when you know that you are not well. “I needed to serve better than in the first game,” he added.
And he fulfilled it. In the first set he lost only six points on serve, while in the second he won 26 of 28 points with the first and only lost six with the second. In the entire game he did not face a single breaking ball. Rublev did not explode at any time, he did not lose his head, but he did not find a way to entangle Alcaraz and two losses of service, from 2-3, made him give up the last four games of the set.
“Very calm” from the bottom
«I thought that against a player like Rublev who hits him very hard I wouldn’t be able to endure many exchanges, but I surprised myself. I played very calmly from the baseline. I wanted to forget that I wasn’t feeling well. “I wanted to go out on the court and try to play,” said the El Palmar player.
For this reason, Alcaraz began to feel more comfortable as the minutes passed, although Rublev also increased the intensity and the second set, in which there was not a single breaking point, was decided in the tie break, where the Murcian He was close to getting into trouble. The Spaniard went from having 4-1 and 5-3 to Beto Martín’s pupil going back to 5-6. He saved the set point with ease, but at 7-7 he missed a very simple volley into the net. Ferrero, in the stands, swallowed hard knowing that he was giving match point to the Russian and that a third set is the worst thing that could happen to him physically. However, after defusing the Russian’s second chance, Alcaraz put an end to the match with a direct winning return with which he got rid of the cold and the pressure off him.
