MURCIA. The Murcian Carlos Alcaraz Garfia, with the naturalness of someone who goes to the office to work but with the illusion of going to do it for the first time, has debuted in a final draw of a tournament of Grand Slam, the one of Australian Open 2021, with a resounding triumph for 3-0 ante el nederlandés Botic Van de Zandschulp, which he has overcome from start to finish to close the clash with partials of 6-1, 6-4 and 6-4 in just 1 hour and 54 minutes.
It was him first best-of-five-set match in the career of this young player aged 17 years, 9 months and 4 days, but in three the ballot was solved by number 141 of the ATP ranking against a 25-year-old rival who appears 10 places behind in that classification.
The Spanish, who was planted in this tournament after having obtained his ticket in the previous held and Doha, where he beat the Slovak Filip Horansky, to russian Evgeny Karlovskiy and to the bolivian Hugo Dellien Velasco, he was not nervous and if he was he hid it very well on the fast track of the Melbourne Park.
In fact, the first set he took in just 22 minutes and yielding only one game. The 6-1 with which he passed over Van de Zandschulp left no doubt about his intentions to go for the win from the start of the crash.
The first five games were won by Juan Carlos Ferrero’s ward, two of them blank. His rival could only breathe in the sixth but Alcaraz in the seventh, with a single point yielded, took the 1-0 to the set scoreboard giving the feeling of a solidity unbecoming of a boy his age debuting in a “major”.
The second set was already somewhat more even, as might be expected, although Alcaraz started it by breaking his opponent’s serve for the third time in the game. “La Roca” took the initiative by winning his service until 1-3, but two games in a row from Wageningen equaled it at 3. Far from being affected, Alcaraz reacted by making a “break” that was key, as he regained control and finished with the set in 55 minutes with a 6-4.
The tennis player born in El Palmar saw his goal of reaching the second round in Melborune, a city in which he has been three weeks, two of them locked in his hotel room due to the forced confinement to which he was subjected by the positive for coronavirus from a fellow traveler by plane from Doha and that despite giving him always negative. That period without stepping on the track does not seem to have sat so bad for him.
In the third and final set of the match he had a different script, as it was Van de Zandschulp who sent his serve good (0-1, 1-2, 2-3 and 3-4), but in the ninth game of this partial, equal to 4, Alcaraz, who ended up winning 99 points for the 75 of his rival, it was imposed as the greats do: being decisive in the moment of truth. A new break, the fifth in the Australian morning – Spanish early morning – put him to a game of victory and, already throwing the ball into the air, he did not miss the opportunity to, with a new 6-4 this one in 37 minutes, extend his stay in the first Grand Slam of the season, the first in the incipient career of this talent who has lived his baptism into the elite in an unbeatable way and achieving what resisted, for example, Roger Federer and Novak Djkovic, and this is to be victorious in his Grand Slam debut, something he did with a fluid tennis and at times brilliant.
Nowe awaits the winner of the duel between the Polish Hubert Hurkacz, 23-year-old player and number 30 in the world, and the Swede Mikael Ymer, 22 years and 95 in the ATP.
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