Casper Ruud suddenly descends into hell. And the blow is monumental. 3-0 up in the first set, the Nordic enjoys a lead that in the blink of an eye ends up shattered, surely the result of the vertigo he suffers when he sees himself above Carlos Alcaraz and he, pissed off, turns on the turbo and squeeze more and more. He fights and fights, but he has no escape. The mirage lasts for the Norwegian for the quarter of an hour that the Spaniard spends in turning the situation around and getting an entertaining duel on track with several flashes, resolved as almost always in favor of number two. The 6-4 and 6-2 (in 1h 44m) leads the Murcian to the match on Tuesday (1:30 p.m., Movistar) with the Italian Jannik Sinner, superior to Grigor Dimitrov (6-4, 3-6, 6-2), and It shines a light on a season translated into a true ode to regularity. He rarely plays the El Palmar one.
There are 14 tournaments that he has played this year and in 12 of them he has reached at least the semifinals. There are two exceptions: Rome, third round against Fabian Marozsan and Toronto, fourth round with Tommy Paul. The rest of the route describes the trail of a Formula 1 that he adds and follows, eager to leave the first notch in Asia and to round off a course in which he leads the record of titles (6) and victories (61); He is also seduced by the idea of leading linearity, in the hands of Novak Djokovic. The Serb rules both on the big stages and in the annual race, but the distance between them has been reduced to 580 points. From now until the end of November, the Murcian has an open field ahead of him and continues to resolve each intervention with outstanding sufficiency. The display against Ruud is noteworthy.
The Norwegian cannot find a way to sink his teeth into it, no matter how much he resorts to one route or another, or even starts with a favorable scenario like this Monday’s. The beginning is confusing, but the Spaniard reacts overwhelmingly. Before Ruud draws an unusual score, those three games over, the Nordic player is already suffering from the typical stress that Alcaraz usually subjects his rivals to, harassed from the first exchanges and forced to row against the current to avoid losing their place in the duel at the first opportunity. Five options are available break and pushes during the 15 minutes that the first game lasts, although Ruud saves his skin and then takes advantage of his opponent’s temporary distraction. There is a phase of lack of control, slight dalliances, but logic immediately prevails. The winner does it without mercy.
“It was tough, with great exchanges at the beginning, also during the rest of the game… But I found the solutions after that first game, and that has given me extra confidence. “There I showed that I was prepared for the battle,” he says, knowing that in the other semifinal (10.30) Daniil Medvedev and Alexander Zverev will clash, superior to Ugo Hmbert (6-4, 3-6 and 6-1) and Nicolás Jarry (6 -1, 6-7(5) and 6-3), respectively.
The four times they have met, Ruud, a hard worker, a model professional and increasingly better at performing on the asphalt, has fallen; However, his tennis has not yet found a sufficient response to proposals as extremely aggressive as those of Alcaraz. The one from Oslo has become a fixture at the age of 24. top-10 and he has already reached three Grand Slam finals, those of Roland Garros (2022 and 2023) and the US Open (2022), but time and again he comes out shorn. It happened in Marbella, Miami and New York, and the scene is repeated again in China, where Alcaraz is already flying through the penultimate round of the tournament without having given up a single set and on an upward trend. As happened in the two previous seasons against the German Yannick Hanfmann and the Italian Lorenzo Musetti, the fate of the match is in his racket.
Ruud tries everything, more direct or more pasty in the rally, changing heights or hitting it flat, but at all times he is required to hold the wall. He repels the rival’s aggression up to 11 times, who in the end hits four break options and happily opts. At cruising speed, very few can stop Alcaraz. There are Djokovic and Medvedev. And very little more. Fresh and sharp, like a missile dressed in green, he awaits Tuesday’s match intact and once again underlining the precocity to which fans are accustomed, who did not contemplate a player under 21 years of age capable of signing so many semifinals in the same season since the Swede Stefan Edberg achieved it, who captured 16 in 1986. Big words one more day.
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