Correspondent from Paris
Court Number Six is an adjacent facility to the even larger Court Philippe Chatrier of staggering size. Here on Friday, one of Poland’s greatest talents, 17-year-old Tomas Berkita, battled to the biggest success of his career to date – the Roland Garros final. The Pole, ranked 1191 in the ATP rankings, was not a candidate in the match against Italian Lorenzo Carbone (705 tennis players). The 18-year-old from Sardinia is a completely different world of tennis compared to the Pole. The much shorter Italian (about 170 cm tall) brings a defensive style to the field. He likes exchanges “to the point of exhaustion”, which is not our tennis player’s strongest point, which in turn depends on his excellent physical condition (he is 191 cm tall). Its element is powerful transmissions (over 220 km/h) and short movements.
In the previous days, Berkita, whom I and several other journalists from Poland met on our way to training at the Jan Boyen facility, admitted that he did not have any expectations for himself regarding the tournament in Paris. It’s no secret that the 17-year-old’s playing style has more advantages on hard courts and on grass.
As it turns out, he can also successfully compete for the highest goals on Parisian clay. The Pole lost only one set in the previous rounds to Charlie Robertson from Great Britain. The Pole was afraid of confrontation with the representative of the host country because of the crowd, but he overcame this obstacle in the quarter-finals.
Continued article below the video
On his way to the first junior Grand Slam final of his career, he faced the aforementioned Polish Carbone. Under the blazing sun, the young tennis players fought a very even battle. Berchetta was looking for offensive solutions from the start, and the Italian was “flying” from right to left and from behind, repelling subsequent pole strikes.
And these “weighed” a lot. One of the balls played by the tennis player hit directly into the photographer’s lens, “hidden” between the stands. The cups hanging on it fell to the concrete, but quietly, and after a while the kind gentleman fixed them himself.
We saw the power of Berkita’s shots again at the end of the first set, when the Pole hit the ball with the frame of his racket so hard that for a few seconds we saw a yellow dot floating in the sky, which, as it turned out later, fell off the court and collided directly with a vase in a nearby tournament café.
Even before the end of the first set, a puzzling situation occurred. After losing one of the moves in the tie-break, the Italian was so angry that after the move he kicked the ball with all his might, and it flew across the length of the court, bouncing first off the advertising banner, and then as it hit the line referee’s head. It happened so quickly that the main referee may not have noticed the situation at all, and similar disqualifications have occurred in the past. In the end, Berkita won the opening set 7:6(3).
There was also a tough battle in the second set. Both tennis players did not want to lose their serve at any cost and that was their main focus. Unfortunately, this time Berketta first missed his only break point in this set (at 4:5), and after a while, after the longest game in this set, he was broken by the Italian, which meant the third set.
source:Onet Sports Review
Date of creation: 7 June 2024 at 16:13
Journalist for the newspaper Przeglad Sportuy One
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