Once upon a time in America, after a rain on Thursday

Russian Daniil Medvedev, who has played four finals and won three titles over the past month and a half, continues his series of successful performances. On Thursday, for the first time, he reached the semi-finals of the Miami Open, a major tournament of the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) in the Masters 1000 category with a prize fund of $8.8 million. the strongest representatives of American student tennis in recent years by Christopher Eubanks.

The fact that Daniil Medvedev will be able to get into the semi-finals of the Miami Open, before his meeting with Christopher Eubanks, only notorious pessimists could doubt. After all, when such a titled tennis player, who is in optimal condition, at an advanced stage of such a representative tournament meets with an opponent who is in the ATP rating outside the top hundred, the result of the match is usually a foregone conclusion. In this case, too, there were no prerequisites for a sensation. Some tennis experts may have remembered that six years ago, at a tournament in Atlanta, a black American beat his more famous compatriot Taylor Fritz, but then he was not the tenth racket of the world, as he is now, but only 125th. The 26-year-old Eubanks did not have the opportunity to meet on a regular basis with the current representatives of the elite. He began his professional career only after several years of playing for the Georgia Institute of Technology team. True, performances are not unsuccessful. Eubanks has been named East Coast Tennis Player of the Year twice, and the same number of times by all American students.

Despite his vast superiority in experience, Medvedev started the meeting rather nervously. This was probably explained by not the most comfortable conditions.

As soon as the tennis players went out onto the court, a light rain began to drizzle, due to which the marking lines got wet. Medvedev tried to play the ball in one or two strokes, but this did not always work out, while the opponent, who had absolutely nothing to lose, felt very relaxed. It is not surprising that for a break, which was announced after the fifth game, tennis players left with a score of 3:2 in favor of the American, who had some advantage in the speed of the second serve. Moreover, both games on the serve of the Russian turned out to be the most stubborn: more than three dozen points were played in them, and Eubanks failed to realize five break points.

However, after a pause that lasted about a quarter of an hour, everything changed dramatically. Now Medvedev has calmed down, and Eubanks has either lost his courage, or has a feeling of heightened responsibility. The longer the exchanges of blows became, the more often in the game of the two-meter American technical shortcomings, which were completely natural for a player of his level, appeared. And sometimes he was just frankly unlucky. And although sometimes Eubanks was very juicy applied to the ball, and also successfully went to the net, his fate was sealed. After exchanging breaks in the middle of the second game, Medvedev again confirmed his class and in the 12th game from the third match point he still managed to finish this meeting on someone else’s serve with a score of 6:3, 7:5.

Having reached the semifinal round of the Miami Open for the first time, Daniil Medvedev not only won his 22nd victory in the last 23 matches.

He also guaranteed himself a minimum of 360 rating points this week. In total, with the 600 points he recently received for reaching the final of a similar tournament in Indian Wells, it turns out 960 points. Medvedev has never played so successfully in March. Therefore, regardless of the results of the current tournament, the chances of the best Russian tennis player to compete this year for the highest places in the world ranking are becoming more significant.

Evgeny Fedyakov