Matteo Berrettini, the tank is now empty: darkness after the Us Open, the Roman’s outburst is a punch in the stomach.
He did not fly across the ocean trusting in a miracle. Matteo Berrettini knows full well that he is not, at the moment, the top ten player who until recently competed in all respects to win a Slam. But he is not the last guy, either, after all. He is a tennis player who has been able to reinvent himself, who has managed to pull something good out of the rubble. To secure three titles in a season in which he played just over 20 matches.
An extremely lucid and rational champion who, when everything seemed to be working against him, laboriously put all the pieces back together, one after another, in order not to give up on his dream. So many times he thought about doing it, yet each time he desisted. And he did the right thing, in hindsight, having managed to prove that he could still be very competitive, net of all the injuries – and misfortunes – collected over the past two years.
The latest blow, as it happens, came just a year ago this time around. After a Wimbledon as a lion (Carlos Alcaraz had stopped him in the round of 16), he had arrived on the American concrete with a few too many uncertainties. He was trying hard, though, but in the middle of the match valid for the second round his ankle gave out, forcing him to surrender. We find out only now, although we could have imagined it, that that was a most painful moment for Matteo.
Berrettini and that unexpected confession
The injury he suffered at Flushing Meadows effectively ushered in a very long stop that lasted from August to March. “At that moment for the first time I thought: I don’t know if I have the energy to start again,” Berrettini revealed in recent hours, thinking back to the ‘darkness’ of 2023 just on the eve of the start of his journey to the Big Apple.
A couple of months later he had made it official that he was saying goodbye to his longtime coach, Vincenzo Santopadre, but it still took some time for him to get back on the field and start, effectively, winning again. Now he is a new man, and it is evident not only from the fact that he has won three titles in a handful of months, but also from his statements.
“The most beautiful word for me today is balance,” he said, and then added that ”this is a rebuilding year, I will think about playing my best tennis and getting excited on the court.” And to thrill the fans with his hammering, of course. For it may have been a year since the last match played in a Slam on concrete, but some things never change.