Paolo Bertolucci crushes Jannik Sinner

The words of Paolo Bertolucci

The day after Jannik Sinner’s elimination from Roland Garros, in the pages of La Gazzetta dello Sport, Paolo Bertolucci spoke about the South Tyrolean: “A setback that stretches insidious shadows over the top-level qualities of the South Tyrolean, plunged into a sudden, minor crisis after three months of great technical depth.”

“While in the upper part of the scoreboard Alcaraz, Djokovic, Tsitsipas and Rublev are battling it out, in the segment occupied by the Italian, the sudden elimination of Medvedev a highway to the noblest appointments on the scoreboard, with the solid but certainly not irresistible Ruud and the terrible but still inconstant Rune as reference points. Evidently, the expectations mounted after Medvedev’s elimination ended up emptying the mental tank of Sinner, who from the very beginning of the match with Altmaier seemed out of phase, stuck, with no drive on the ball and, moreover, in revisable athletic condition.”

“What have been the certainties that have accompanied him in these months have ended up abandoning him: just think of the cross-court backhand, usually a sentence and instead this time played always without bite. True, in spite of the poor performance, Jannik could still have imposed himself in four sets, and on match points he was certainly unlucky, but the general feeling would not have changed anyway: the Italian’s ball travels at lower speeds than last year or two years ago.”

“What was most surprising in these two unexpected defeats was his absolute inability to find an alternative to just bombing from the back. He should have realized by now that simply pushing from the back does not win against anyone. None of the progress shown so far has been seen: no variation of cuts, few short balls and almost always without strategy, descents to the net reduced to a smidgen.”