The Polish Hubert Hurkacz, number 17 in world tennis, was proclaimed champion of the Shanghai Masters 1000 today after beating the Russian Andrey Rublev, ranked 7th in the ATP ranking, 6-3, 3-6 and 7-in the final. 6 (8).
The match was resolved in 2 hours and 7 minutes and began in favor of the eventual winner, who was devastating in the service during the first set and finally managed to take advantage of a breaking point in the fifth game after several saves by his rival. .
In the second set, Rublev found his best version, starting very strong in his turn and achieving a break on Hurkacz's first serve.
The excitement in a very close final set was served in the tenth game, where Hurkacz had a match point saved by Rublev with a direct serve that drove the stands of the center court of the Qizhong sports complex crazy; The Russian finally managed to force the tie break.
However, in the tiebreaker, Rublev wasted his advantages (he went 0-3 and 2-5) and finally Hurkacz remained more composed to win 10-8.
This is title number 7 for the Pole, the second this year, among which this is the second time in which he has managed to win a Masters 1000 category tournament after his victory in Miami in 2021.
Throughout the previous rounds, Hurkacz eliminated the Australian Kokkinakis, the Taiwanese Hsu, the Chinese Zhang, the Hungarian Marozsan and the American Sebastian Korda.
Rublev and Hurkacz had already met four times, with two victories for each - the last two, for the Russian -, so this count will now be in favor of the tournament champion.
The Shanghai Masters is played on a hard court and has prize money of 8.8 million dollars, of which almost 1.3 million are for the winner of the tournament.
The competition had not been held since 2019 due to the Chinese Government's 'zero covid' policy, and its last winner had been the Russian Daniil Medvedev, who this year lost in the third round to Korda.
