Tennis: beating Zverev in five sets, he flies to the final at Roland Garros
The character
/ paris
For now it’s Mr. Nobody. Because a Slam Stefanos Tsitsipas has not yet won and instead you enter the tennis legend only in this way: by beating the monsters at their home.
After losing four semifinals, three consecutive, Stefanos overcoming Sascha Zverev in five troubled sets (6-3, 6-3, 4-6, 4-6, 6-3), however, won the right to try. The first Greek to go this far, to a shore unknown to him.
“Now I can only think about my roots,” he said, swallowing tears in his throat during the interview on the pitch. “The fact that I come from a very small place just outside Athens, and that this was the tournament I dreamed of playing since I was a child. At home there are so many people who follow me, Greece has become part of the tennis community and I am pleased that it is Maria and I who hold the flag high ».
Maria Sakkari, who saw the women’s final close, very close, but who in the semifinals wasted the matchpoint she had managed to win against the Czech Krejcikova.
Her mother, Angeliki Kannellopoulou, was among the top 50 in the 1980s and the Greece of white gestures – if we don’t count the Hellenic chromosomes of Sampras, Philippoussis and Kyrgios – until a few years ago she had little to put next to her: a top- 15 like Eleni Daniilidou at the beginning of the millennium, the handsome but negligible Niki Kalogeropoulos (108 Atp) in the 1970s.
“Stef” belongs to a different (tennis) race, that of the predestined awaiting a destiny that they perceive as a reward and a burden. Against Zverev he could have closed it in three sets, he risked losing it at the beginning of the fifth, with three break points against, “but I’m a man who fights, who never gives up.” The central helped him, finally full and almost everything lined up for him. For ‘Tzitzì’, the boy who cried after the defeats and is now moved by the victories, perhaps the most similar to the demigods of the older generation among the young. And for his tennis, made of touch and courage, not just brute strength, definitely the most creative and varied of the new generation.
At 22, “Stef” has already won the ATP Finals and six other tournaments, including the last Monte Carlo, is n ° 5 in the world, he has beaten all the greats twice. But he never faced Polyphemus in the cave, the Minotaur in the mental, technical and athletic labyrinth of a Grand Slam final. “It’s not like you can invent anything new against certain champions. I’ll just have to play my best and think that this is another match on clay, which happens to be played here ». As Ulysses teaches, sometimes to transform from Nobody into a hero you have to know how to deceive monsters. Including those who live in it. –
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