World no. 3, Daniil Medvedev has beaten Carlos Alcaraz, who has been on fire since his opening match in the US Open to play Novak Djokovic in the finals.
He won in a three-hour-and-22-minute battle, 7-6(7) 6-1 3-6 6-3, setting up a final rematch against Novak Djokovic.
Neither player managed to break the other’s serve, although Medvedev dropped two break points in the fourth game, and in the final eight games of the set, only eight points were won against serve.
Medvedev won in his first meeting against Novak Djokovic, beating the respected Serbian international in straight sets.
The match got to a tiebreaker and Daniil won the first set. Then, the Russian went on to win his first three service games to love and twice broke Alcaraz as he took a 5-1 lead.
In the sixth game, with both players having held all their service games so far, Medvedev got the final win, breaking Alcaraz to go 4-2 up.
Speaking on his performance, Daniil said:
“I said I needed to play 11 out of 10. I played 12 out of 10, except the third set. That’s the only way. I don’t know if he’s still 20 or 21, but [he is] so young, already two Grand Slams, world No. 1 for many weeks.”
“It’s honestly just pretty unbelievable and I think nobody has done it before him. To beat him, you need to be better than yourself and I managed to do it.”
“The third set was not so bad, I lost one serve. I didn’t have a lot of opportunities on his serve, but I felt like I was not that far. So I was like, ‘I have to continue pushing. I have to do a little bit better on my serve’.”
“I saved some break points at 1-all. There was a very crucial, super-long game where I managed to do some amazing points to stay in the game and then he kind of — maybe we don’t see him do this often — he started to miss a little bit. Yeah, amazing.”
