Tennis
Super sensation at Wimbledon! The Russian won an unrealistic match in three days
Roman Safiullin / Photo: © IMAGO / Eibner-Pressefoto / imago-images.de / Global Look Press
True, he did not spend all of them on the court.
Russian Roman Safiullin, having qualified for Wimbledon, did not even suspect what trials he would face in the very first match. The debutant of the grass tournament in London entered the court with the intention of winning, but he achieved his goal after … several tens of hours.
This has never happened before in our guy’s career!
Managed to register
Safiullin is known as a tennis player who achieved high results in his teenage years. A native of the Moscow region won the junior Australian Open and was the second racket of the world. In adult tennis, his affairs are not so good, although he did play at two Grand Slam tournaments.
At Wimbledon, Roman previously played in the qualification, but did not qualify for the main draw. This year, he still got into the top 128, and without any selections – he was helped by a passing 92nd place in the ATP rankings. True, Safiullin was not supposed to receive additional bonuses in the form of seeding.
It is interesting that earlier the Russian got into funny stories related to TBSH. In particular, he missed Roland Garros because… he forgot to register. Fortunately for him, there were no such missteps at Wimbledon.
The first rival of Roman Safiullin was the most experienced Roberto Bautista-Agut. The Spaniard’s career has included a Davis Cup win, a Wimbledon semi-final and an Australian Open quarter-final, all in 2019. Roberto entered the current London tournament as the 20th seed.
Miracle in the second set
The match between Safiullin and Bautista-Agut began on Monday evening, July 3. It seemed that it would end as quickly as possible – in the first set, the Russian did little, while his opponent made a minimum of mistakes. Roman took two games, but it was not enough for more – 2:6.
Something similar to an equal fight began to emerge in the middle of the second set, when Safiullin got used to it and made fewer mistakes. True, sometimes he was still let down by the pitch. The swing game reached a score of 6:6 and a tie-break, where Roman managed to perform a small tennis miracle: losing 1:5, he did not flinch and pulled out a victory in the set – 7:6 (9:7).
The third batch turned out to be even more stubborn. The Russian managed to return to the game after an unsuccessful start, and with a score of 5:5 he took the 11th game to zero (having made two aces at the same time) and seemed to be as close as possible to success. But the Spaniard switched the set to a tie-break, where he no longer made gifts – 6:7 (4:7).
Over forty hours
With the score 1:2, the match was stopped due to darkness. Tennis players went to their hotels in anticipation of Tuesday. But, as it turned out, the originally announced date and time were incorrect.
The harsh London weather intervened, in which the main role is played by rain. It is very dangerous to play on wet grass, and the organizers could not take such a risk in any way, and they still cannot stop the precipitation. Safiullin and Bautista-Agut had to spend a day in agonizing waiting, while drawing conclusions from the first three sets.
As a result, they were allowed to continue playing only on the afternoon of Wednesday, July 6. More than 40 hours have passed since the start of the match!
Success Marathon
The forced pause benefited Roman. He owned the initiative, stopped making mistakes on the pitch and generally looked more rested. The Spaniard, on the other hand, seemed to be exhausted and quickly wilted after a good start. Here, things did not come to a tie-break – Safiullin took the fourth set with a score of 6:4.
In the decisive game there was a classic swing game with game exchange. Until the score was 5:5, the tennis players did not make a single break – both served flawlessly. Proof of this is the fact that only in one game out of the first ten it came to “over-under” – all the rest climbed with an enviable advantage of the server. This trend was broken by Roman, who pulled out a break in the 11th game and got a huge advantage. He did not miss it: the Spaniard’s mistake at the reception brought Safiullin a sensational victory – 7:5 in the fifth set and 3:2 in the match.
The three-day marathon, which in total took about 47 hours (of which only 4 hours and 8 minutes were spent on the court), ended with the success of the Russian. In the second round he will play Corentin Moutet. Of course, I would like such extreme matches as with Roberto Bautista-Agut to remain in the past for Roman Safiullin.
Source: Sportbox
I am a sports journalist who has written for a number of Sportish. I have a background in journalism and have been writing since I was young. My main focus is sports news, but I also write about general news. I am currently working as an author at Sportish.