Daniil Medvedev beat Andrey Rublev at the Nitto ATP Finals tournament

On the second day of the Nitto ATP Finals, the final tournament of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) with a prize fund of $15 million, ongoing in Turin, Daniil Medvedev defeated Andrei Rublev in two games, to whom he lost there exactly a year ago. In another match of the first round in the Red Group, the second racket of the world, Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz, lost in three sets to the two-time winner of this competition, Alexander Zverev from Germany. With the latest news from the Pala Alpitour arena, Kommersant correspondent Evgeny Fedyakov.

Daniil Medvedev and Andrei Rublev, who have consistently stood side by side in the top ten for the fourth season in a row, probably still cannot be called very close comrades, as foreign journalists sometimes do. But their relationship is nowhere near the antagonism that is often difficult to avoid between direct competitors, and which, for example, occurred three decades ago in the case of two famous German tennis stars, Boris Becker and Michael Stich.

Before the current meeting of the Russians, many recalled the match they played in Turin, also at the start of the group stage, exactly a year ago. That game became the highlight of the entire tournament, lasted more than two and a half hours, and Rublev won with a memorable score of 6:7 (7:9), 6:3, 7:6 (9:7), who grabbed the decisive point on the fifth match point in the draw out of 37 hits. On Friday, a Kommersant correspondent asked the future competitors how they reacted to the fact that the lot again brought them into one group, and received the same answers with different shades. Medvedev, according to him, simply did not think about this topic, and Rublev, laughing, admitted that he did not want to end up in the same company with the Italian Jannik Sinner in much the same way as with Medvedev, but since there was no third option according to the drawing rules, he basically doesn’t care.

The reason why Rublev would ideally prefer not to intersect in a group with the father of his one-year-old goddaughter, who came to Turin with Medvedev and his wife Daria, lay on the surface. This year he lost to Medvedev twice – in the final in Dubai and the quarterfinals of the US Open, taking a maximum of four games in each of the five games. Thus, the psychological advantage now seemed clearly not to be on Rublev’s side. At the same time, he demonstrated an excellent level of tennis at the last two tournaments in Vienna and Paris, where in the semifinals, having a chance to win, he lost only to future champions Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic. That is, it was wrong to consider Medvedev the clear favorite.

The match looked like the complete opposite of last year. His script turned out to be far less dramatic, and the result was the opposite. The problems that Rublev faced from the very first game were obvious, although he initially overcame them, fighting back one break point in the first game and managing to save the third game at 0:40. But the seventh game went poorly for Rublev, and Medvedev, in turn, fought off a total of seven break points in the eighth and very long tenth games, mostly due to his excellent serve.

The second batch turned out to be more fleeting. After some magnificent plays at high speeds, the packed 12,000-seat Pala Alpitour arena applauded both Russians. However, Medvedev was not going to slow down, dragging his opponent into the viscous swamp of his defensive combinations, which at the first opportunity turned into sharp counterattacks, and Rublev could not find any fresh tactical ideas. Finally, he was unlucky. On a break point that Medvedev had in the fifth game, Rublev slipped, fell, tried to take off in a hopeless jump and repel a devastating stroke, but failed, got upset and juicily kicked an advertising banner of a famous airline hanging on the net. The result was 6:4, 6:2 in an hour and a half.

“Compared to last year, we are both playing much better. Daniil is so easy to compare, and neither am I, although you can’t tell by the result,” Rublev told a Kommersant correspondent at a press conference. “And everything was decided, as always, by the key points. Daniil served well on several break points that I had, and on several other occasions I myself failed to complete important rallies.”

Medvedev agreed in principle with this point of view. “Last year before the tournament I was in bad shape,” he admitted. “I didn’t do a lot of things in training, I was nervous, during the tournament I tried to get over myself and played very averagely against Andrey. But now it was a completely different story. Despite the recent defeat in Paris, here I feel great in all respects: I’m physically ready and serve well. As for Andrey, he has improved a lot mentally. This helped him win the Masters in Monte Carlo, and today the first set could have turned out differently if I had not played well in several important moments.”

In the first, afternoon match on Monday, Alexander Zverev from Germany, despite an extremely unpleasant fall that almost cost him an ankle injury already in the third hour of the game, in three games he broke the resistance of the second racket of the world, Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz, who was playing at the Nitto ATP Finals for the first time – 6: 7 (3:7), 6:3, 6:4. Now on Wednesday the losers of the first round will play first – Alcaraz and Rublev, who have never met each other in official meetings before, and in the evening Medvedev and Zverev will face off. In general, the Spaniard’s defeat completely confused the already unclear balance of power in the Red Group. Although, taking into account the latest results of Alcaraz, who, taking into account his previous tournaments in Shanghai and Paris, lost his third match in a row, his debut fiasco was by no means an absolute sensation.

Evgeniy Fedyakov