Zverev Puts On a Show in Third-Round Thrashing in Madrid

| by Balasz Virag

Alexander Zverev will be playing in the fourth round of the 2023 Madrid Open and his third-round performance was worth the spot.

In the first round of his most successful ATP 1000 tournament, the tall German struggled in the first two sets against Roberto Carballes Baena but eventually won in three sets. After the match, Zverev said that the court in Madrid is his absoloute favourite in the world and he made that obvious in a third-round match against Hugo Grenier.

The Frenchman defeated two very solid players, Diego Schwartzman and Sebastian Korda on his way to the third round and so Zverev had to be aware of his opponent's qualities, despite his ranking not being sufficient for the Top 100 in the world.

And although the main storyline of the match was Zverev's serve, the match itself was a very good one too. Yesterday, Stefanos Tsitsipas hit 39 consecutive first serves and he didn't miss a serve for more than an hour.

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It seemed that Zverev saw that as he was on track to do the same thing in his match against Grenier. The German was 100% with his first serve for over 30 minutes, as he hit all of the first 20 serves that he hit in the match.

And it was the serve that helped him with an extremely dominant performance in the first set. The former world no. 2 won 27 of 35 points in the first set and 12 of 13 on his serve. All of that amounted to a 6-1 win in just 25 minutes.

Zverev continued to dominate on his serve also in the second set. He broke three more service games of his opponent and thanks to holding comfortably, it was an easy win for the German 6-1, 6-0.

With an early finish on Sunday, he will want to recover well for his fourth-round match which can be against the world no. 1 Carlos Alcaraz, who will take on the 26th-seeded Grigor Dimitrov.

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