His timing was impeccable, both on and off the court. On the 71st birthday of Adriano Panatta, the last Italian man to win a grand slam title, Matteo Berrettini became the first Italian in history to reach a Wimbledon final with a 6-3, 6-0, 6-7 (3-7), 6-4 victory over Poland’s Hubert Hurkacz.
Berrettini, the Queen’s Club champion and seventh seed, had talked of his self-belief before the match, insisting he was ready to improve on his unexpected run to the last four at the US Open two years ago. In the biggest match of his career, he was as good as his word. Hurkacz, the conqueror of second seed Daniil Medvedev and eight-time champion Roger Federer, was undone by a performance of power, panache and conviction.
Having won 11 games in a row from 2-3 in the first set, Berrettini stood two points from victory in the third set only for Hurkacz, the 14th seed, to belatedly rouse himself from his two-set torpor. But the Italian refused to let his head drop, breaking early in the fourth and driving for the line to finish the match with 22 aces and a remarkable 60 winners. What a moment it promises to be for Berrettini when he takes his tilt at history just hours before the Azzurri face England at Wembley in the final of Euro 2020.
“I have no words,” said Berrettini, who will play Novak Djokovic in the final after the top seed beat Dennis Shapovalov in straight sets. “I need, I think, a couple of hours to understand what happened. I just know that I played a great match, I’m really happy to be here. I enjoyed the crowd, my family and whole team are there. I think I never dreamed about this because it was too much for a dream. I’m just so happy.
“When you play at this level everything has to be… I am trying to be the best at everything – mental, physical, tennis, tactics and everything. I think after the third set I was feeling I deserved to win that set, but Iost it. I said to myself, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I was feeling [I was] the stronger player, and that’s what I said to myself. And eventually it paid off.”
“So far it is the best day, tennis-wise, of my life. Hopefully Sunday is going to be even better, but I’m so proud to bring the flag here. So many great names they compared to me, I kind of feel chills.”
With the Italian press in overdrive, Panatta, the elegant Roman who won the 1976 French Open, has been prominent among those great names. So too has Nicola Pietrangeli, who in 1960 became the only other Italian man to make the last four at Wimbledon. Pietrangeli, twice the champion at Roland Garros, had advised Berrettini that concentrating on his serve would give him a 60% chance of victory. Yet expectations of a service-dominated contest in which tiebreaks would feature heavily were quickly thrown into doubt.
Berrettini hinted at an alternative trajectory as early as the third game, unleashing a pair of stinging passing shots that seemed to unnerve Hurkacz, who pushed a mid-court ball into the net to bring up three break points. The Pole recovered strongly, reeling off five consecutive points before missing a break point of his own in the next game, but neither man was looking impregnable on serve.
So it proved. In the seventh game, an error from Hurkacz brought up another break point for Berrettini, who tamed a 134mph serve before knifing a series of sliced backhands into the Pole’s backhand corner. A sudden switch to topspin produced an error from the Pole and Berrettini, a break to the good and riding a wave of momentum after winning 10 consecutive matches on grass, drove home his advantage ruthlessly.
Hurkacz would not win another game until the beginning of the third set. Bereft of form and increasingly bereft of confidence, Hurkacz now began to look every inch the player who came into Wimbledon on a six-match losing streak. Nothing seemed to work for the Pole, his shots finding the bottom of the net or the frame of the racket with such unerring regularity that it felt as though the ball were being guided by some invisible Machiavellian force.
Berrettini held to love at the start of the second set, signalling his burgeoning belief with a beautifully crafted drop shot. He slammed a forehand approach shot for a winner on the opening point of the next game and Hurkacz, harried and hapless, responded with three unforced errors to concede another break. Now the Italian was unstoppable, serving with pace, variety and accuracy, dictating from the baseline, and disrupting his opponent’s rhythm with some scything backhand slices. Berrettini swatted away a break point at 0-5 with a 129mph ace, and in the next game he wrong-footed Hurkacz on break point to seal a fifth consecutive break. It was his 10th game in a row; with just 58 minutes gone, he had a two-set lead.
It was a humiliation for Hurkacz, a moment of karma perhaps following his third-set demolition of Federer. Yet the Pole has shown his mettle at this tournament, not only against the eight-time champion but also in fighting back from two sets to one down against Daniil Medvedev, the world No 2. Having left the court for the extended comfort break that has become de rigueur in such moments, Hurkacz returned with fresh vitality, making light of some tight service games to force a tiebreak. A superb forehand return set him up for only his sixth point of the match against Berrettini’s first serve. When the Italian missed a simple volley with the court at his mercy to go 4-0 down, he smiled ruefully – a tacit acknowledgement, perhaps, that the set was over.
Taking a leaf out of the Hurkacz playbook, Berrettini disappeared from the court. An immediate break of serve followed and, though he missed a match point against the Hurkacz serve at 5-3, and hit a nervy double fault as he served for the match, the outcome was never again in doubt. He will take some stopping.