Jannik Sinner stared down the heat and a switched-on opponent on Wimbledon’s Centre Court to book his spot in the semifinal.
The defending champion stretched his Wimbledon winning streak to 12 with a 7-5 7-6(4) 6-3 over Jan-Lennard Struff, the oldest first-time men’s singles quarterfinalist in tournament history.
It took a while for Sinner to pull away from the hard-serving German, but he navigated all the challenges of the tricky encounter brilliantly.
“I felt like he started better than me,” Sinner, who now awaits the winner of Novak Djokovic’s quarterfinal with Felix Auger-Aliassime on Tuesday, said after the win. “I was struggling a little bit, but then I started to serve a little bit better. I was a break up in the second set, couldn’t use it, but tried to stay there mentally.”
Sinner hit 16 aces and 32 winners, and converted three of nine break points. Once he took the second set he relaxed and put the match to bed. Sinner dropped just five points on serve in the final set and converted a single break to pave the way to the finish line, which he reached comfortably in two hours and 35 minutes.
“The second set could have ended in a different way,” he said. “Tiebreaks are always 50/50.”
“In the third set, I was a little bit more relaxed. His first-serve percentage dropped a little bit, which helped me to feel slightly more comfortable – very happy to finish in three sets.”
Heat Not an Issue
Perhaps more important than any of the shots he hit was the way that the Italian weathered the balmy temperatures. After wilting in the heat in Paris last month, much has been made of Sinner’s struggles with warm conditions. He silenced some of those worries with an efficient effort on Tuesday.
“Thanks for reminding me,” he said on court with a smile, when on-court interviewer Rish Persad broached the subject ”No, we worked a lot, especially after Paris, trying to understand what went wrong there, and we prepared ourselves in the best possible way. It was a huge test today. I felt really comfortable on the physical side today, so it is a good step forward.”
More to follow…
