Daniil Medvedev played his best match in a very long time to easily beat Alexander Zverev in the China Open semi-final.
This was supposed to be a really close match between two players who have a pretty big rivalry on that ATP Tour going on. It didn't end up being a close and long match but it was a very high-quality match. Zverev has been in really strong form recently with the Chengdu Open trophy and looked very sharp this week as well.
Medvedev kind of struggled through his matches dealing with the tennis balls which he's not a fan of. It didn't matter today because he played a superb match to take down the German in two sets and snap his 7-match winning streak.
He basically didn't do anything wrong in the entire match which is very impressive and finished the match with an incredible stat line. He had 8 aces and only one double fault. He also had 19 winners and only one unforced error, which was the double fault.
Just think about that for a second: he finished the match basically with no unforced errors from live play against an in-form Zverev with tennis balls that make it really tricky to hit through an opponent. That's how impressive the Russian was, and even a pretty solid Zverev had basically no chance in this one.
He wasn't bad by any means but didn't play the crucial rallies better. Both allowed four break points on their serve, but Zverev didn't convert any of those while Medvedev did, and that was the difference. The match could have been much closer, but Zverev needed to be as flawless as Medvedev and simply wasn't.
The final score was 6-4 6-3 for the Russian, who awaits the winner of the upcoming match between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner.
0 Comments