Lorenzo Musetti Shows What It Takes To Win a Trophy in Tennis
· Yahoo Sports
If you’re wondering about what it takes to win a trophy in tennis these days, Lorenzo Musetti showed us. Apparently, you have to play until one in the morning, spend three and a half hours chasing tennis balls around an indoor court, survive four match points the following afternoon, and somehow find enough energy to beat one of the world’s best players in the final.
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At least, that is what Lorenzo Musetti had to do. The Italian won the ATP 250 title in Lyon on Sunday, defeating Taylor Fritz 6-3 6-4 to claim his third career trophy and first since October 2022. Four years without a title and seven consecutive defeats in finals, and after everything he endured in France, the championship match turned out to be the easiest part of the week.
Musetti Shows What It Takes To Win a Trophy in Tennis
Three and a Half Hours, and That Was Just Friday
Musetti’s tournament began innocently enough: he defeated Matteo Arnaldi 6-1 6-4 in the opening round, then followed with a 6-4 6-4 win over Moise Kouame. Nothing special in those two, but then came Luca Van Assche. The Frenchman and Musetti produced one of the season’s most ridiculous indoor matches, spending three hours and 32 minutes exchanging increasingly exhausting baseline rallies on Lyon’s painfully slow court.
Neither had the power to consistently hit through the other, and both are exceptional movers, which made things worse. In the end, the result was an apparently endless sequence of points that should have finished several shots earlier. Musetti eventually won 7-6 6-7 6-4 as the match finished at 1:17 a.m. local time, just six minutes short of the famous three-hour, 38-minute Murray-Raonic encounter at the 2016 ATP Finals. And what was Musetti’s reward?
A semi-final against world No. 6 Flavio Cobolli the following afternoon. Wonderful.
Four Match Points, Then Somehow a Trophy
Cobolli, who had enjoyed considerably more time to recover, was hardly interested in making life easy for his compatriot, and he showed it by winning the opening set 6-4. Musetti then responded by taking the second 6-2, but the deciding set produced another extraordinary ordeal.
At 5-4, Cobolli earned four match points on Musetti’s serve and, true to the ridiculous fashion his week had taken up to that point, Musetti saved every single one. Then, as if recovering from the brink of defeat wasn’t enough, he broke Cobolli in the next game and served out the match 4-6 6-2 7-5.
Another two and a half hours on court, and consider what that meant. In roughly 24 hours, Musetti had spent more than six hours competing, finished one match after 1 a.m. and saved four match points against a Top 10 opponent. He was now expected to recover and face Fritz in Sunday’s final. And this was a player who had already endured a miserable season of injuries, having reached a career-high No. 5 in January before falling outside the Top 25.
Somehow, the final was almost anticlimactic. Musetti broke Fritz early in both sets, never faced a break point and completed a 6-3 6-4 victory in just 81 minutes. The difference was unforced errors: Fritz had 28, while Musetti had only 11. So, after surviving everything Lyon threw at him, the Italian finally delivered a relatively straightforward performance when it mattered most. Four years after winning Hamburg and Naples in 2022, he was a champion again.
The Last Word
In the end, we can only say that there is something almost absurd about the amount of suffering required to win what is, ultimately, an ATP 250 tournament. Musetti had reached Grand Slam semi-finals, climbed to No. 5 in the world and established himself among the most talented players of his generation.
Yet his trophy cabinet still contained only two singles titles until Lyon. After seven straight final defeats, a late-night marathon, four saved match points, and more than six hours of tennis across two days, he finally earned his third.
Apparently, winning the trophy was the easy part; getting there nearly killed him.
Main Photo Credit: Aaron Doster – Imagn Images