World No 1’s spellbinding effort dismantled by Alcaraz in the fifth set to conjure theatre in Paris and a rivalry for the ages
B
y the end, it felt cruel to want more. Look at the state of these men: bedraggled and dishevelled, dragged into a place of wildness and madness, of mental atrophy and physical dismay. You, on the other hand, have spent the last five and a half hours sitting on your couch, eating snacks and gorging on the finest sporting theatre. You want this prolonged for your entertainment? You want more of this? And of course the only real answer is: yes. Yes, please.
Twilight zone at Roland Garros. Two sets each, six games each: the shadows ravenous, the noise bestial, every thrill laced with a kind of sickness. By the end, admiration began to meld with pity. Pity for their teams and families, trapped in the convulsions, feeling a spiralling hypertension with every passing moment. Pity for the tennis balls, being smacked and beaten mercilessly across the Paris night. Pity for the watching Andre Agassi, who you could swear had hair when this match started.
And ultimately, with one scream and one shrug, pity for Jannik Sinner, for whom it will be no consolation at all to have lost one of the greatest matches ever played on the crushed brick of Paris. Neither he nor Carlos Alcaraz had lost any of their grand slam finals. Sinner had never won over more than four hours. Alcaraz had never come back from two sets down.
