Jannik Sinner hasn’t built a genre like Roger Federer (grace) or Pete Sampras (power) but unflappability has its virtues. It brought Sinner a 10th consecutive victory over Alexander Zverev here and his second Wimbledon singles title in a row.
Sinner, 24, has an 82% win rate at Grand Slam events and reached his 100th victory at this highest level by subduing Zverev’s opportunistic ardour. These are the kind of numbers that suggest a new Novak Djokovic has replaced the one Sinner dismantled in Friday’s semi-finals. Wherever the injured Carlos Alcaraz was watching, he will know their rivalry can only turn more intense.
Zverev had broken a run of nine Sinner or Alcaraz Grand Slam titles wins when winning the French Open – but that was a mere interruption, not an ending. Zverev’s win at Roland-Garros was a case study in an older player (he’s 29) finally proving to himself that he belongs on the sport’s commanding heights.
“Once you win a major you know how to do it and you feel like you can do it again,” Zverev said. “You have this feeling inside of you.”
In that spirit he threw himself at Sinner’s proficiency with a liberated sense of possibility. And it worked, for a set, before Sinner did what great champions usually do when threatened. He searched for tactical and psychological control and found it in a match that was mundanely power-based until it turned into a drama built around personality and desire.
A piece of sport with only two contestants that lasts four hours is a challenge to today’s shrinking attention spans. Especially when it feels like an endless exchange of bullets.
How much phone scrolling could you squeeze instead into four hours? A Wimbledon men’s final asks for patience, commitment, and a strong bladder. But it gives generously too, beyond the privilege of being one of only 15,000 on Centre Court. It distils the savage power of the best lawn tennis, at its nexus of force, spite and technical virtuosity.
The Centre Court crowd might be the most spoilt in sport. In Sunday finals alone it has seen in recent decades the might of Sampras, the majesty of Federer and the rolling maul that Rafa Nadal, Djokovic and Andy Murray forced on Federer, whose subtlety and poise had to fight for its rights.
Now Wimbledon regulars have Sinner versus Alcaraz. Zverev was pushed forward as French Open champion to break the growing Sinner hegemony but only made it look stronger. If you can attack a champion like that and still end up on the seat of your pants, what is the plan now for those who don’t want to live in Sinner’s shadow?
The defending champion and Zverev produced symphonies of ferocious hitting – rallies that felt like video games, the ball pinging and zinging across the English lawn of Centre Court. Spectators love rallies. Players don’t want too many of them. All that slipping and muscle burn, for the sake of a single point.
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Occasional rallies were the highlight in the early stages of a final that induced ennui in parts of the crowd. Big-serving tennis can become metronomic and repetitive. The entertainment squeezes into the gaps between serves hitting the back wall with a thud.
But then this clash of the top two seeds came alive, in the third set, and fell into line with the Centre Court tradition of every point feeling suffocatingly tense.
It took 2hrs 42mins for Zverev to earn his first break point – in set No 3. In that time a World Cup football match with extra-time and penalties would have been and gone. And Zverev let it slip – in the game where he slipped in a worse way, sliding on the grass to hyperextend his right leg, and dropping awkwardly on his knee.
In the next game Sinner broke his serve and a side of himself Zverev showed when smacking the umpire’s chair with his racquet in Mexico came back out on Centre Court. Zverev threw his racquet down as the third set raced away from him. Now he needed to win both the last two sets against a defending champion looking increasingly assured.
Instead his demise picked up pace, before he went down 7-6, 6-7, 3-6, 4-6. What started as a test of endurance for spectators ended with familiar exhilaration and a genius cross-court shot from Sinner to earn Championship point before the coup de grâce.
People worried the Sinner-Alcaraz rivalry might become stultifying. Now they can’t wait for it to return.
Photograph by Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP via Getty Images