Sonego and Musetti follow Jannik Sinner’s wave: Spaniards still chewing bitterly

It almost seems like an endless challenge that between Italy and Spain in international tennis, at least in men’s tennis: forty-eight hours after the confrontation between the two main representatives of the two nations, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, with the Italian’s success in the final over the Murcian in Monte Carlo, it is this time Lorenzo Sonego and Lorenzo Musetti who got the better of two Spanish athletes, Pedro Martinez and Martin Landaluce, in the first round of the ATP 500 tournament in Barcelona.

Sonego, who was coming from a long period without official matches (he had not played since the second round of the Australian Open, beaten precisely by Musetti), struggled not a little to beat the number 125 in the ranking, but in the end he managed to come out on top by making up for the slip-up in the second set: 6-2, 2-6, 6-4 the final result of a match that lasted more than two and a half hours.

Musetti, on the other hand, was back from two eliminations at the first hurdle between Indian Wells (against Fucsovics) and Monte Carlo (beaten by Vacherot, then a semifinalist): against Landaluce, who had sowed panic in Miami by unexpectedly reaching the quarters, the Carrara-based player took a risk in the first set, coming back from a three-game disadvantage, only to emerge at a distance: 7-5, 6-2 the score, after almost an hour and a half of play.

So the bitterness remains in the mouth for Spanish tennis, whose rivalry with Italian tennis proves to go far beyond the Sinner-Alcaraz dualism, as also demonstrated by the 2025 Davis Cup final, in which the two national teams faced each other without their main standard bearers, nevertheless giving rise to a challenge that is difficult to forget especially for the Italian colors, which were able to celebrate their third consecutive Salad Bowl, their fourth overall.