Wimbledon day two: Mpetshi Perricard serves up a new record but Fritz comes out on top

By the time Taylor Fritz and Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard walked back out onto Court 1, they had waited over 17 hours to play the fifth and final set of their first round match. At 22:16 on Monday night, play was suspended with the umpire deeming there was not enough time to finish the match before the 23:00 curfew. Fritz, the fifth seed, was understandably irritated. Having been two sets down, he had fought back to win the next two, despite having been 5-1 down in a fourth-set tiebreak. The momentum was with him. But now it was being paused.

“They would’ve let us play if my opponent agreed to,” commented Fritz on an Instagram post. “I said I wanted to, he didn’t.”

One imagines that being a Grand Slam tennis player means you are entitled to a level of air conditioning that means you don’t end up tossing and turning all night due to the heat like the rest of London was. But it is hard to imagine either player would have gotten much sleep with the fifth set hanging over them. The adrenaline pumping from playing for two hours and 53 minutes but without a conclusion. The desire to stay focused on the match at hand, balanced by the need to switch off.

It wasn’t even like the duo had certainty over when their match would resume. The Order of Play slotted them in after world number one Jannik Sinner, who beat his compatriot Luca Nardi in straight sets, 6-4, 6-3, 6-0. Tennis is often a waiting game, but 17 hours does seem extreme.

When they eventually began just before 15:30, we saw a match in miniature.

All the attention had been on Mpetshi Perricard and his serving. Fritz had not done much wrong – in fact, he did not give up a single break point in the match – but with Mpetshi Perricard regularly hitting serves of over 135 miles per hour, opportunities were limited. Most jaw-dropping of all was his 153mph serve in the first set. Astonishingly, Fritz returned it.

He joked after the match that his coach was always encouraging to serve more into the body but he didn’t like the tactic. He had sent the video of the point as proof that even the fastest serve in Wimbledon history couldn’t be that effective when played into his body given he won it.

The serve is so fast, it creates a low guttural sound off the racquet. Gasps peppered the crowd, either out of amazement or in fear of what it must be like to face a ball like that. Fritz is no slouch when it comes to serving – the pair hit 66 aces between them – but the ball off his racquet looked like it was travelling through treacle in comparison.

Naturally, they both rolled through service games, as they had during the first four sets yesterday. Any opportunity to make in-roads on their opponents serve was quickly snuffed out, and it looked certain we would be heading for another tiebreak.

Then suddenly it was over. Finished as quickly as one of Mpetshi Perricard’s serves. With neither player having had a break point in the fifth set, suddenly Fritz had three match points. As Mpetshi Perricard overhit a forehand, a victim of his own strength, the win was Fritz’s.

“It’s a really crazy match,” said Fritz afterwards. “I obviously wanted to play last night but either way I felt confident coming back today and getting it done.”

“Yeah I would say (expectations are high). It put a lot of pressure on me. I really didn’t want to go out in the first round.”

Having recently just won his fourth Eastbourne title, Fritz is certainly seen as someone who should be able to make inroads at Wimbledon, although he has never been past the quarter-final. Here he lasted the longest to make it through this extraordinary tie.