Berrettini leaves Arizona with an invaluable knowledge: it wasn’t easy, but he succeeded big time.
He could have won, sure. The fact that he didn’t succeed doesn’t mean, however, that the first tournament in 7 months didn’t go even better than any wildest expectations. Matteo Berrettini came back and boomed, in every sense of the word. His forehand has exploded, his serve has exploded. And his desire, evidently suppressed for too long, to play and entertain his audience exploded as well.
It matters little therefore, at the end of the day, that the scepter of king of Phoenix went to Nuno Borges and not to the Roman champion. It certainly can’t be said that the 2021 Wimbledon finalist didn’t try his hardest, quite the contrary. He gassed 4 Frenchmen in quick succession, 2 of them within 3 hours of each other, with enviable nonchalance, as if he had not been stationary for more than half a year. It is this, then, the victory that Matthew will take with him as he leaves the Arizona desert. Coupled with the knowledge, which is no small thing, that he still has many, many more cartridges to fire.
And that is not all. There is more. Because being reborn as a phoenix at the Phoenix Challenger has also allowed him to do what serves him best at this most sensitive time in his career: gain ground.
Berrettini, this is no small thing: this is his victory
The very long stop that followed the foot injury he sustained on August 31 at the Us Open has not only penalized him physically and mentally, but also in terms of his ranking.
The champion who was once the sixth best player in the world had leapt, as he lost the points he had laboriously collected in the previous season, to 154th place in the Atp rankings. The points he accumulated in Arizona, though not many, still allowed him to move up a bit and gain a few positions. He gained 12, to be precise, reasoning that he is now 142nd in the world rankings.
We are far, of course, from his best ranking, but the excellent result achieved in Phoenix can only give us hope about Berrettini’s future. Now the doors to Miami will open wide for him, and it was important, before he set course for Florida, that he stretch his legs a bit and test his muscles and head. And everything can be said except that he did not pass this very difficult test in a big way. Never more than now, then, are we sure that the best is yet to come.
