A Masters 1000 over two weeks is a long time. The first half resembles an ATP 250 and the second begins slowly, with the progressive entries of the top seeds. Even the players find it long, even if some appreciate this extra day of rest in the first week. But overall, it’s a long time. But time is above all very relative.
Take Carlos Alcaraz, for example. In his quarter-final against Grigor Dimitrov, he must have found that he was sorely lacking. In the humid and stifling heat of the hottest day of the week, the tournament gave birth to a real gem of tennis between the Spaniard, seeded n°1, and the Bulgarian, seeded n°11. An anticipated match because it was going to pit two elegant players with a creative style. But a match for which few people in the aisles of the Hard Rock Stadium imagined an outcome other than the victory of Alcaraz, recent winner of the Masters 1000 at Indian Wells and on display since his arrival in Florida. Most observers thought that Dimitrov’s beautiful tennis would be broken by Alcaraz’s.
But this forgets that Dimitrov is always capable of dazzling strokes of brilliance. Honestly, he has everything in his game to be a solid top 10 player. Everything except consistency. Too often, we have seen it shine brightly and fade away several months later. In Miami, he is in blazing star mode. And against Alcaraz, from the first exchanges, he adopted the perfect tactic. Namely total aggression. Faced with Alcaraz, to exist, you must not ask questions and get into him. The Spaniard hates it when he doesn’t have time to organize himself and dictate his pace. If we had to find a big flaw in his almost perfect armor, it would be this inability to turn the direction of the match around when he is deprived of a few seconds of reaction.
Then, under the eyes of Mike Tyson who must have appreciated the spectacle, Dimitrov attacked all the balls by taking them upward rebound. He had to defend break points on his first two service games, but it was him who led 3-0. There was fire from both sides, but the most stable, the most effective, was the Bulgarian. He logically pocketed the first set.
The $1,000 question was whether Dimitrov would be able to keep up. A break to lead 3-1 gave an element of an answer. But when Alcaraz broke, screaming, and then came back to 4-4, we could think that the match was turning.
Well we were wrong. Dimitrov won his serve and offered himself two match points on Alcaraz’s. The first was the right one. No Sunshine doubles for Alcaraz and a semi-final against Alexander Zverev for Grigor Dimitrov.