This is a reality: the Alcaraz-Sinner duel is here to stay.
There will be more chronicles like this, perhaps this match will become a classic. There the two best tennis players of their generation face each other, who knows if they are ready to devour their predecessors, the Next Gen that now leads the tables (Medvedev is first in the ATP and Zverev is second) but has never given the true surprise.
In the popular imagination, Nadal, Djokovic and Federer remain the untouchables.
Whoever goes to the newspaper archives of the Alcaraz-Sinner will read the story of two opposing spirits.
Jannik Sinner (20) is red-haired and elongated, and hides his face under his cap and hardly shows any feelings, neither celebrates nor laments, he is ice and silence.
Carlos Alcaraz (20) has the lower body of a sprinter and there is fire in his eyes, and he shouts when he fails and raises his fist when he takes an important point, and he shows off an unpredictable tennis, full of nuances, drop shots, lobs and dribbling.
None of them is clearly superior to the other, and that is why the matches are so evenly matched that they are decided in details as miniscule as they are reversible.
They are also decided in mental states.
We are in the final of the Umag tournament and no one loses serve in the first set but in the tie break Sinner falls behind and is 5-1 down and finds himself forced to turn the tables. He does it, corrects the drift and now serves to equalize at 6-6, and at that point he corners Alcaraz, who responds as best he can and launches a desperate right hand from the back of the court that surprises Sinner in the net and confuses him and makes you fail.
Alcaraz takes the sleeve (7-5 in the tie break) and, apparently, gets the match on track: in a blink he advances 1-0 in the second set and even reaches 0-40 in the second game, but then he gets stuck and Sinner grows up and takes six partials at once, a donut that annuls the Murcian, suddenly shrunken and disoriented.
“That second game has been decisive. We were playing it all at the time,” Sinner will say later.
Now the stage has been transmuted.
Alcaraz's game is twisted, in whose mind doubts arise. Will he be able to retain his title from last year in Umag?
(Right there he had collected the first ATP trophy of his career; Carlos Moyá, Rafael Nadal's coach, has the absolute record for victories in Croatia: he had won it five times, with a treble between 2001 and 2003)
Sinner is a hammer that breaks everything and Alcaraz dismounts and breaks into pieces and can no longer rejoin the game.
“If I want to win tournaments, I will have to keep working hard, even more so,” says Alcaraz.
He doesn't go back and watches as Sinner, the guy who had beaten him in the Wimbledon round of 16 three weeks ago, hits hard and sharp from the back of the court and dominates every aspect of the match, including the mood.
Sinner rides on top of the Murcian, who today will wake up fourth in the world, already very close to the Top 3, but he must look in the rear-view mirror and see how the Italian comes from behind, already the best exponent of the current Italian school, that of Musetti (the man who a week ago knocked down Alcaraz in the Hamburg final), Berrettini, Sonego or Fognini.
(Sinner will be eighth today)
“I have lived through very unpleasant moments this year, but I have overcome them and I have grown. Winning is part of the process,” says Sinner, who speaks like he plays: his speech doesn't go off the rails.
And yet it is solid.
