Taylor Fritz is the last American to leave the All England Club. The No 12 seed went down to Italy’s No 25 seed, with Lorenzo Musetti winning 3-6, 7-6, 6-2, 3-6, 6-1 in three hours and 27 minutes, turning on the style in the fifth set.
The headline is that this is Musetti’s first Grand Slam semifinal, playing on grass — a surface on which just a year ago he said he felt lost.
12 months on, this victory lifts his grass-court record to 18-9, a 67 per cent win rate, compared to 63 on clay and 49 on hard — though over larger sample sizes. He is 12-2 on grass in 2024, and in consecutive matches has beaten two players whose serves and serve plus one are their strongest weapon. First, Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, and now Fritz, who he completely muffled in terms of winning points behind first serves.
Fritz still won more points in rallies between zero (an unreturned serve) and four shots, 92 compared to Musetti’s 88. But Musetti overwhelmed that point differential in all the other points played, gaining +6 on rallies of between five and eight shots, and +11 on rallies of nine shots or more.
There were two secrets to all this. The most important is the backhand slice — a Wimbledon weapon, and a shot that is one of the strongest in Musetti’s arsenal — and a missing piece in that of Fritz. Its effectiveness allowed Musetti to reduce the American’s opportunity to hit his strength (his forehand) into the Italian’s presumed weakness (his one-handed backhand.) Using the slice, Musetti could cleanly and repeatedly send the ball back to Fritz neutrally, extending rallies and putting Fritz in a position from which he couldn’t attack as effectively.
That wasn’t the biggest problem for Fritz. Against Musetti’s slice, he made errors off his forehand from being forced to hit up on the low, skidding ball and on his backhand, could only spin a high-bouncing shaped ball back into the ad-court. That allowed Musetti to camp out on that side of the court and run around to hit his forehand off a ball in his strikezone, repeatedly turning neutral situations into attacking ones. Fritz, not a slicer, could not reply with the same shot, which would both have lessened that problem and given him a route to approach the net. Musetti was also able to disguise his attack better than Fritz, mixing in heavy and spitting one-handed topspin backhands to keep the American honest.
The next secret is returning. Musetti (like Tommy Paul did, at least for a set, against Carlos Alcaraz) used a chipped forehand return off Fritz’s wide serve, sending it low on to the American’s backhand side. He used the same chip on his backhand side, happy to give Fritz a neutral ball and stop him from taking advantage of the limitations of returning with a one-handed backhand.
Djokovic, who can slice with the best of them and is more of a spot server than Fritz, is a different proposition. But if that serve starts winning a few less points come Friday, just take a look at Musetti’s racket, and the backspin on the ball.
Jelena Ostapenko went into her quarterfinal against Barbora Krejcikova with the air and aura of an efficient winning machine. She had dropped no more than three games per set in the eight sets she won to get there, and had run the least distance of any player left in the last eight of the women’s draw to get there.
The Czech No 31 seed, who has endured a miserable few months of illness and injury, put an end to all that, in a 6-4, 7-6 win full of all the precise groundstrokes and neutralising variety that made her a French Open champion in 2021 and world No 2 in the WTA rankings.
There was a time not long ago when Krejcikova was not shy about airing complaints of what she felt was a lack of respect.
She had won a Grand Slam title at the French Open in 2021. She’d won seven Grand Slam doubles titles. She had proven she could beat Iga Swiatek, the world No 1.
She wanted to be included in discussions about the best women in the world, along with Swiatek, Aryna Sabalenka, Elena Rybakina, and now Coco Gauff, and she didn’t shy away from complaining about her court assignments. She knew she wasn’t as popular as other Grand Slam winners, and she pointed out that she would never become as popular as they were if she didn’t get to play on stadium courts, where more people might come to appreciate her game of spins and changes of pace.
She has spent a lot of the last year battling injuries and confidence issues. She had won just three matches between February and June.
But she’s now won five consecutive matches at Wimbledon, and is reverting to form.
“It was very very difficult, it was super difficult even before this tournament,” she said after beating Ostapenko.
“There have been many doubts, from inside, but also the outside world.”
After that, Krejcikova took a quick break and then headed back out to the courts for her quarterfinal doubles match.
That ought to get her some respect.
It was soon after 2:30pm on Wednesday afternoon when, after 61 minutes of play, singles action on Centre Court was done for the day. Elena Rybakina took care of Elina Svitolina in just over an hour, and then, following Alex de Minaur’s withdrawal from his match against Novak Djokovic because of injury, two doubles matches completed the schedule.
It was no one’s fault, just one of those unfortunate sequences of events, but it made for a pretty disappointing day for those fans who had (not cheap) Centre Court tickets on Wednesday. It was a particular shame as the sun finally came out on Wednesday, with outdoor matches on one of the show courts for the first time since Sunday.
One of the options available once De Minaur pulled out at around midday would have been to move Taylor Fritz’s match against Lorenzo Musetti over from Court 1 to Centre. It was decided that that wouldn’t have been fair on Court 1 ticketholders who were looking forward to that match, and so Wimbledon tried to compensate Centre Court fans by moving a match involving a British mixed doubles pairing (Joe Salisbury and Heather Watson) before scheduling popular former champion Ash Barty to play her invitational doubles with Casey Dellacqua against Andrea Petkovic and Magdalena Rybarikova.
The frequent rain delays have meant scheduling has been a constant headache at this year’s Wimbledon. Having had too many matches to fit in for so long, suddenly, the tournament didn’t have enough.
One solution to the issue of lost singles matches in the closing stages of slams would be to use an equivalent of the “lucky loser” system that tennis has in qualifying. In that instance, if someone withdraws from the first round, they are replaced by one of the top-ranked players who lost in the qualifying competition.
At this year’s Wimbledon, a number of lucky losers took up spots in the main draw after benefiting from the rash of pre-tournament withdrawals. One of them, the big-serving Frenchman Perricard, made it all the way to the fourth round.
This is the second consecutive major in which one of the quarterfinals has been a walkover. Djokovic had to pull out of his match with Casper Ruud after suffering a torn meniscus in his fourth-round tie against Francisco Cerundolo.
In both that instance, and the one that saw De Minaur pull out on Wednesday, it was pretty obvious straight away that there was a decent chance the player wouldn’t recover in time for their match. And so asking Cerundolo or Arthur Fils (the player De Minaur beat on Monday) to stick around in case they were needed wouldn’t have been that tough a sell.
There was a similar situation at Wimbledon two years ago, when Rafael Nadal beat Taylor Fritz despite carrying an abdominal injury, to set up a semifinal with Nick Kyrgios. It felt unlikely straight away that he would be fit to play Kyrgios. Sure enough, he pulled out the next day, and the Australian had a walkover to the final.
Players don’t seem to like this idea. The argument is that it’s one thing giving fringe players the chance to take up a slot in the first round when realistically they have no chance of winning the tournament, but it’s another at this stage of the competition.
The possibility of a player losing but going on to lift the trophy a few days later is seen as inherently wrong.
So much so that when world No 1 Jannik Sinner was asked by The Athletic about the possibility of this kind of “lucky loser” situation in Paris last month, he responded:
“Sorry. What?”
Before expanding, a little bit: “But he lost already, no?”
And then: “No, I think if someone loses in the main draw, that’s it, no.”
The chances are that with tennis becoming increasingly physical, more of these late-tournament withdrawals will occur. How the sport deals with them — and the knock-on effect for fans — remains to be seen.
Just wait until the end of the point.
