When Denis Shapovalov won his first game, serving and volleying, he smiled and addressed the crowd demanding due recognition.. He had just put a tiny bandage on the bleeding. He was being subjected to a process of annihilation by Carlos Alcaraz, but he was no longer going to stay at zero. The world number 1 was primed with his one-handed backhand and cornered him in such a way that the Canadian hardly knew where the shots were coming from.. He was running around the Philippe Chatrier moving to hit with his right, trying to protect himself from the bullets. Alcaraz won 6-1, 6-4 and 6-1, in two hours and 10 minutes.
This man liquidated by the Spaniard after a small hiatus in the second set was called to be one of the tennis players with the resources to occupy a place among the best. At the age of 18, and still number 143 in the world, he defeated Rafael Nadal in the round of 16 of the Canadian Masters 1000. Left-handed, talented, aggressive, with a one-handed backhand, he was fresh blood and full of promise. In 2019 he played the final of the Paris-Bercy Masters 1000, helped by the loss of the Spaniard due to injury in the semifinals. In 2021 he lost to Djokovic in the Wimbledon semifinals. It got to be top 10. It only has, however, one title: the one achieved in 2019 at the ATP 250 in Stockholm.
Discontinued to 32nd place in the ranking, with only one match won on the previous clay-court tour, Shapovalov has remained in another unfinished project, as was evident in the poor opposition raised against the Spaniard, whose matches to date depend almost exclusively of himself. Only when the piston goes down, when he is distracted by his obvious superiority, can his opponents make up the score. From 1-4 that weighed on him in the second quarter, he went to 6-4 that practically sealed his pass to the round of 16.
Djokovic sweats
After Novak Djokovic, whom he could meet in the semifinals, spent three hours and 35 minutes disposing of Alejandro Davidovich, Alcaraz just shredded his third victim of the tournament.. The champion in Indian Wells and Buenos Aires and already a double winner in Madrid and Barcelona, a quarterfinalist at Roland Garros last year, maintains the pulse that places him as the top candidate to take over from Nadal as the new champion of the tournament.
His next adversary will be the Italian Lorenzo Musetti, who knocked out the almost always solvent Cameron Norrie with the same result (6-1, 6-2, 6-4).. A whole generational duel against the very fine tennis player from Carrara, only one year older, who last July already beat him in the Hamburg final, also on clay, the only precedent in major ATP tournaments.