Hello Friends,
Image Courtesy
French Open this year will be in news for many reasons.
Firstly because of many players pulling out even before the tournament started and then defeat of most of the seeded players even before the quarterfinals and then came the surprise of Roger Federer pulling out to prepare for Wimbledon.
We now have another BIG news as Thirteen times French Open champion and last year's winner Rafael Nadal ousted in semifinals by number one player Novak Djokovic yesterday.
It's also the year where there were many young players making news and this included players like Alexander Zverev, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Domin Thiem, Daniil Medvedev and others.
Let's look into the semifinals matches played yesterday and the final of Women's singles where Barbara Krejicikova won the title as an unseeded player.
Semifinal Between Rafael Nadal and Novak Jokovic:
It was a day Rafael Nadal will try to forget as early as possible.
Having started with 5-0 scoreline in the first set, Rafa then lost 3 straight games before recovering to win a game to close the first set at 6-3.
And that was the beginning of more struggle for Rafa and Djoker started to raise the level of his game and went on to win the next set rather easily at same scoreline of first set i.e. 6-3.
That is when Rafa realized it's not easy to score against Djokovic and improved his game but eventually lost the set again with scoreline of 6-7(4-7 actually in tiebreak).
With back to back set wins for Djokovic, he had the momentum with him and Rafa needed to stop Djokovic in set 4 to have a chance of forcing the tiebreaker fifth set, but, that never happened as Rafa kept mishitting and lost the set 2-6.
Rafa was definitely not as his usual best and Djokovic knew even if a small mistake by him would give advantage to Rafa and he played better tennis than Rafa to win the match and he will be facing Stefanos Tsitsipas in the final tomorrow.
Djokovic will be eyeing for his Second French Open singles title after he won his First in 2016 defeating Andy Murray.
It seems like age is catching fast for Rafael Nadal and his long playing career is plagued by many knew injuries and operations, it will be a daunting task for him to win majors again but not impossible one for him being a fighter as we have seen him for so many years.
Semifinal Between Stefanos Tsitsipas and Alexander Zverev:
It was a match between 2 young players, 24 year old Zverev against 22 year old Stefanos and both played their heart out to reach higher level in this tournament.
As the scoreline reads, the first 2 sets were won by Stefanos rather easily with 6-3, 6-3 as Zverev took his time to adjust to the playing style of Stefanos.
In the next 2 sets, Zverev made a super come back to win 6-4, 6-4 and that means, the match went to the Fifth set.
Stefanos had to forget about the last 2 sets where he lost and start afresh to win this decide set and he starts off well to win the first game and Zverev leveled it up in the second and after that, Stefanos had back to back wins to make it 5-2 and eventually won it 6-3 to reach his First grand slam final!!!
Stefanos is the First Greek player to reach the finals of a grand slam and he will be facing Djokovic for his First grand slam title.
These 2 young players will take lots of confidence form their matches at French Open and both being young players, will definitely have many more shots at Grand slams.
Source