Saturday in Monte Carlo was a thoroughly equitable affair. After four gruelling quarter-finals the previous day, it didn’t matter if you were the defending champion, like Stefanos Tsitsipas, or a debutant in the last four of a Masters 1000 event, like the unseeded Alejandro Davidovich Fokina. Everyone was in the same boat, and the order of the day was simple: dig deep or go home.
Between them, Tsitsipas and Alexander Zverev had toiled for five hours and 50 minutes on Friday to make the last four. Both bore the scars. Zverev, the second seed, had to grapple with a thigh problem and a wildly partisan crowd before subduing the determined challenge of local favourite Jannik Sinner. Tsitsipas, meanwhile, effectively had to win his match against Diego Schwartzman twice after blowing a 6-2, 5-2 lead and then falling 4-0 behind in the decider, a late finish under the floodlights leaving him thoroughly spent. Beyond the physical and mental challenge facing the pair, there was also the personal edge that is rarely far from the surface when Zverev and Tsitsipas meet. In their most recent clash, in Cincinnati last autumn, the German accused his rival of cheating, and while relations may have thawed somewhat since then, neither man would relish the prospect of defeat to the other.
In the event, the personal undercurrent was barely detectible, Tsitsipas running out a 6-4, 6-2 winner. At one point in the second set, Zverev went long with a piledriver backhand that he seemed more interested in aiming at Tsitsipas than landing inside the lines, but by then the contest was lost. A subdued start and some untimely double faults had something to do with that, but mostly it was down to Tsitsipas, whose greater energy and tactical clarity reaped dividends. The Greek was the steadier of the two off the ground, made adroit use of drop shots and low, mid-court slices to pull Zverev forward, and produced an array of fine passing shots to thwart him at the net. In short, he dug deep.
“I had to put my soul out there, and I demanded from myself to make it physical, as surprising as this may sound, after a very physical battle last night,” said Tsitsipas. “I knew that my body may not respond the same way that I wanted to, but I had certain demands and I kind of stick to those demands and made them happen, as surreal as it may sound.”
Zverev recovered an early break with a scorching backhand winner, but his discomfort was clear as he struggled on serve and racked up mistakes. An error-strewn passage of play cost him a second break in the sixth game, from which Tsitsipas was always in control.
“I was quite limited in what I did today,” said Zverev. “In the match yesterday [towards] the end I was struggling a little bit with my serve because of my leg. But at the end, I was limited a little bit today. Yesterday obviously took a lot out of me. I think the issue with my leg didn’t help.
“But Stefanos played 10 times better than me, so he deserved to win at the end of the day. Nothing more to say. I wish him good luck in the final.”
There, Tsitsipas will face Davidovich Fokina after the Spanish world No 46, who battled through in three sets against Taylor Fritz on Friday, survived another protracted contest to prevail 6-4, 6-7 (2-7), 6-3 against Grigor Dimitrov.
At 30, Dimitrov was the oldest of the four semi-finalists, and after battling all the way to a third-set tiebreak to get past 11th seed Hubert Hurkacz the previous day, the Bulgarian quickly found himself with his back to the wall once again as Davidovich Fokina powered through the opening set without facing a break point. True to the prevailing spirit of the afternoon, however, Dimitrov rallied magnificently, shrugging off the disappointment of losing an early second-set lead to take full advantage when the younger man faltered with the finishing line in sight.
Leading 5-3 in the second set, and with a place in his first ATP final tantalisingly close, Davidovich Fokina netted a backhand into the open court that would have taken him within two points of victory. Then, as he served for the match in the following game, the 22-year-old made a sequence of errors from the baseline. Now Dimitrov was re-energised, racing through the subsequent tiebreak to level the contest before claiming an early break in the decider. Davidovich Fokina was confronted with a simple choice: dig deep, or bid farewell to an unforgettable week. He chose the former.
“When I was 2-0 down and he had breakpoints too, I pushed myself to the limit,” said Davidovich Fokina, who has so impressively followed up his win over Novak Djokovic earlier in the week. “I was tired and he was playing very good, me not so good in the beginning of the third set. But I managed to run [down] every ball, to put the ball in. You know, I just did it and I’m glad that I pushed myself.”
It was that kind of day.