Tennis player Pavel Kotov reached the semi-finals of the ATP tournament in Stockholm

One of the main sensations of October at the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tournaments was the performance of Russian Pavel Kotov in Stockholm. Taking a place outside the top hundred in the world classification, he first made it into the main draw of the BNP Paribas Nordic Open – a 250 category competition with a prize fund of €750 thousand, and then reached the semi-finals, beating three opponents at once, ranked much higher in including the winner of two ATP titles this year, Dutchman Tallon Grixpoor.

This week’s ATP tournaments are taking place without the participation of players from the top five in the world rankings. But for tennis players who are a little lower in it and continue to fight for tickets to Turin for the final tournament of the year, they are extremely important. True, these athletes mostly performed extremely unsuccessfully. Let’s say, the sixth racket of the world, Dane Holger Rune, last year’s champion of the Stockholm BNP Paribas Nordic Open, who is trying to break through to Turin for the first time and has recently begun collaborating with the former first racket of the world Boris Becker, lost in his first match to the Serbian Miomir Kecmanovic.

However, the main troublemaker in Stockholm was Pavel Kotov, a 24-year-old Russian who currently ranks 109th in the ATP rankings. He first qualified and then beat three opponents who were significantly higher than himself in the world classification. First, Kotov fell under the hot hand of the Wimbledon quarterfinalist, American Christopher Eubanks, who lost to the Russian in a tiebreaker in the third set, then the well-known Italian Lorenzo Sonego, and in the quarterfinals, the third-seeded Dutchman Tallon Grixpoor, the 25th racket in the world, having already won two ATP titles this year – in Pune (India) and ‘s-Hertogenbosch (Netherlands).

While inferior to his opponent in the sharpness and speed of the ball, Kotov surpassed him in stability and showed miracles of resilience in the 12th game of the first set, when he broke back on his serve from 0:40.

At the beginning of the second game, he once again fought back a triple break point, after which, with the help of a good first serve, he completely demoralized the Dutchman, winning in about an hour and a half – 7:6 (7:4), 6:2. This is the second semi-final at ATP tournaments in Kotov’s career, although the April clay tournament in Moroccan Marrakech, where he showed such a result for the first time, was still not so representative.

And now the Russian has every reason to count on a place in the top hundred at the end of the year, having avoided the need to play qualifications at the Australian Open

In terms of points scored this season, Kotov, who also has the quarterfinals of the grass tournament in Mallorca and several other good results, is already in 86th place. This means that it is almost impossible to knock the Russian all-rounder out of the top 100 in the next few weeks.

In Tokyo, at a more representative competition of the 500 category, at the distant approaches to the decisive stages, Alexander Zverev from Germany, who is still seventh in points scored this season, was eliminated, as well as American Taylor Fritz with Norwegian Casper Ruud and the winner of the recent Masters category tournament 1000 in Shanghai by Pole Hubert Hurkacz, occupying places from 9th to 11th in this classification.

But Aslan Karatsev was in the spotlight. The 30-year-old Russian first left the top 100 this season, then returned to it, and now, occupying 50th place, is making an attempt to become one of the 32 best tennis players in the world, which will give him the right to enter the Australian Open among the “seeded”. And following the results of the Tokyo Kinoshita Group Japan Open Tennis Championships, the solution to this problem will certainly become much closer. In any case, after confident victories over the American Francis Tiafoe, the Chinese Zhang Zhizhen and the Australian Alex de Minaur, who theoretically could still get to Turin, Karatsev will probably reach the fourth ten on Monday.

Moreover, in the semifinals his opponent will be only the 215th racket of the world, 20-year-old Japanese Shintaro Mochizuki, who, having not previously won a single match at the ATP level and having received a wild card, broke Fritz’s resistance in the second round, and in the quarterfinals – Australian Alexey Popyrin. So the Russian seems to have every chance of reaching the final. True, we must remember that the height of Mochizuki, who is distinguished by his speed of movement around the court and will probably play at home with the support of the stands, is 175 cm, and in the semi-finals of the recent tournament in Zhuhai, China, Karatsev unexpectedly could not cope with another high-speed Japanese “kid” – Yoshihito Nishiokoi.

Evgeniy Fedyakov