The reigning Wimbledon champion and winner of the last Grand Slam tournament, Carlos Alcaraz, arrived in London in far from optimal conditions. The third-round match with the American Francis Tiafoe almost became the last of the 21-year-old Spaniard in the tournament. Alcaraz, seeded third, was just one game away from ending his performance in the English capital, but survived the tie-break in the fourth set and then broke the resistance of a tired Tiafoe in the decisive set (5:7, 6:2). 4:6, 7:6, 6:2.
One match later, Carlos made another strange impression in a match against Frenchman Hugo Humbert. At his best, Alcaraz beats opponents of this type much more confidently, but this time he had to suffer a lot to get into the quarter-finals: 6:3, 6:4, 1:6, 7:5. Interestingly, in the winning match, the Spaniard’s serve was noticeably broken and Humbert managed to break five times in four sets.
The last two matches have shown that it is quite possible to fight against such a Spaniard. And Carlos’s opponent in the quarter-finals, 27-year-old American Tommy Paul, decided to take advantage of this opportunity. Moreover, in recent weeks, the 12th seed at Wimbledon had just reached his peak and was showing perhaps the best tennis of his life. In June, Paul won the title at a tournament in London, scoring five consecutive victories at the Queen’s Club. It is noteworthy that one of them was defeated by Briton Jack Draper, who had sensationally eliminated Alcaraz from the English tournament the day before.
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At Wimbledon, Paul claimed four more wins, extending his winning streak to nine matches and reaching the quarter-finals of an English major for the first time in his career. What added intrigue to today’s match was the equality in the head-to-head clashes: 2-2. Moreover, only one of the four encounters ended in straight sets. The fate of the other three matches only became clear in the deciding sets.
The opening match of the Wimbledon 2024 quarter-finals turned out to be as unusual as possible for an English Slam. It consisted of 10 matches lasting 74 minutes. At the moment, you can often see 2.5 sets in men’s tennis on grass, but here the opponents fought for more than an hour, not even reaching the tie-break. The most revealing game was the sixth, which lasted more than 15 minutes.
Tommy Paul
Photo: Mike Hewitt/Getty Images
Every serve became a huge test for the Spanish tennis player. He was unable to find the rhythm and naturally lost the set in the end, failing to win the right to a tie-break. In the 12th game, with the score at 30:40, Carlos ran to the net after a strong serve and a tight back cross, but Tommy performed a magnificent dribble from the left along the line and took the first game.
Riding a positive wave, the American was quick to take advantage of his home success and started the second set straight away, immediately breaking and taking a 2-0 lead in the game. And only at that moment Alcaraz began to gradually improve, becoming more and more like the player who, at the age of 21, had already won three Slam titles. Conceding a set and a break, Carlos grabbed his opponent tightly and instantly returned the lost serve.
Later, in the seventh game, Alcaraz broke again and then wrapped up the set in his favour. Compared to the opening match, the Spaniard significantly increased his percentage of successes with the first ball (72 versus 59), which gave him a significant advantage, as the American began to act much worse on the reception. Carlos began to take the matches more calmly and no longer felt the same pressure as in the first hour of the match.
Carlos Alcaraz
Photo: Clive Brunskill/Getty Images
At the start of the third set, the opponents exchanged breaks, but Alcaraz’s missed serve looked like an accident, not a pattern. The 21-year-old Spaniard, although still far from the best examples of his game, which he demonstrated in the same Wimbledon 2023 semi-final with Russian Daniil Medvedev, but Paul was showing less and less resistance to Carlos with each passing minute. Alcaraz quickly made another break in the set, regaining his advantage in the game, which he summed up with another break at the end for 6:2.
If in the first set and even in the second Paul still found options in long rallies, of which there were many in this match for playing on grass, then in the third and especially in the fourth hour of play Alcaraz already had complete control of the initiative on the court. There was simply not enough space for the entire match. In the fourth set, Carlos very confidently scored a winning point, achieving his 12th consecutive victory in TBS matches – 5:7, 6:4, 6:2, 6:2. Perhaps during the match, Alcaraz, a big football fan, was simply afraid that he would not have time to sort out his tennis affairs before the start of the semi-finals of the 2024 European Championship, and decided to seriously speed up.
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For the second year in a row, Alcaraz will contest the Wimbledon semi-finals with Medvedev, who today won a marathon five-set match against world number one Jannik Sinner 6:7, 6:4, 7:6, 2:6, 6:3. Unfortunately, last year the fight at this stage of the tournament did not work out. Then the Spaniard easily won three sets in a row with the same score of 6:3 and reached the Wimbledon final, where he then defeated Novak Djokovic himself in a crazy match. A year later, Daniil had the chance for revenge, without which the Russian would not have been able to reach the first Wimbledon final of his career. The Spaniard continues to defend his title on the courts of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.
