Sinner and Musetti at heart of Italian renaissance at Roland Garros
You might call it magnificent. Magnifico, even.
For the first time in the Open era, seven Italian men reached the second round of a Grand Slam singles draw this week at Roland Garros, with leading lights Fabio Fognini, Matteo Berrettini, Jannik Sinner, Lorenzo Musetti and Marco Cecchinato ensuring a healthy contingent are through to the last 32.
Only in 1955 have as many as seven Italian men won through to the second round in Paris – a vintage that featured eventual semi-finalist Giuseppe Merlo and future two-time champion Nicola Pietrangeli. But this is no outlier: in October the second-round contingent was six-strong, with Sinner, Berrettini and Cecchinato among them. The tennis Azzuri are enjoying something of a purple patch, one that surely marks a changing of the guard.
“It's really nice to see all of the Italians,” said Berrettini, a veritable veteran at 25, speaking after his second-round win over Federico Coria. “It's something we are not used to. Nobody is used to it. And I think it's really great.”
“Probably I'm the old one now with the team,” Fognini, 34, admitted ahead of his third-round clash with Federico Delbonis on Friday. “I think for the next ten years we're going to be really, really good. We have two really good ones, young ones – that’s going to be really interesting in the future.”
While 37-year-old Andreas Seppi now ranks among the oldest Italians to win a Grand Slam match with his first-round victory over Canadian tyro Felix Auger-Aliassime before losing to Soonwoo Kwon, it is the sight of 19-year-olds Sinner, who beat compatriot Gianluca Mager in the second round, and Musetti – a straight-sets winner over Yoshihito Nishioka – that has truly captured the imagination.
Six months Sinner’s junior, former ITF Junior World No. 1 Musetti has enjoyed a rapid rise in the professional ranks over the last nine months, a spell that began outside the world’s Top 250.
The 2019 Australian Open junior champion has twice posted semi-final runs on the ATP Tour in 2021, breaking into the Top 100 after beating the likes of Diego Schwartzman and Grigor Dimitrov in Acapulco, before reaching a career-high No. 76 following his final-four appearance in Lyon.
Now, having beaten No. 13 seed David Goffin in the first round in Paris, all eyes are on the teenager as he prepares to face compatriot Cecchinato, a second-round winner over No. 21 seed Alex De Minaur, for a place in the last 16 on his Grand Slam main draw debut – a situation that does not appear to faze him in the slightest.
“I think the juniors career helped me a lot,” said Musetti, the second-youngest player in the Top 100 after Spanish 18-year-old Carlos Alcaraz.
“I was always playing with pressure, especially when I won the Australian Open juniors. I mean, the pressure from media and from other things has grown a lot – I started to manage the pressure when I was young. Now I'm still young, but I am a little bit more experienced than before. Sometimes it works and sometimes not.”
Sinner’s own rise was well-established prior to Paris. Tipped as a breakthrough star in the ITF's Class of 2019 series and now ranked No. 19 in the world and seeded No. 18 in Paris, the former national skiing champion already has two ATP titles to his name from Sofia and Melbourne, not to mention his final appearance at the Miami Open in April.
Notably, while Sinner reached the Roland Garros quarter-finals on debut in October, the three key tournament results of his career have come on hard courts – something of an anomaly for a player from Italy, where most grow up on clay.
“I like hard court indoors, to be honest,” Sinner admits. “You don't have some situations that you normally have [outdoors] – you have a little bit of wind, little bit of sun, things can change in the sky, sometimes it's cloudy - all these kind of things.
“I think I can play on every surface. I still have to understand how to play on them a little bit, especially on clay I think, which helps me a lot trying some other things, trying to sometimes serve in different ways, or even on the baseline points trying to mix up a little bit.
“Grass, I don't have much experience, to be honest. I'm very excited for this grass season, which is my first grass season – I mean, I played qualies [at] Wimbledon, I played in Halle, I played in 's-Hertogenbosch – that's it. I think there I still have to understand how to play.”
With three Italian women also reaching the second round in Paris, bringing the nation’s contingent to have won at least one match to 10 in 2021, the future looks bright for the Azzurri – but for all their early promise, the young guns know there is still some way to go to emulate the likes of Pietrangeli, Adriano Panatta, Francesca Schiavone and Flavia Pennetta and claim the nation’s sixth Grand Slam singles title.
“I repeat: I'm still young,” Musetti insists. “I need to learn a lot of things and improve every day.”