Sinner beats Cressy: in Montpellier the blue conquers the seventh seal in his career

The opportunity was not to be missed and Jannik Sinner did not miss it, in the assault on the seventh career success on the ATP circuit. Faced with the Parisian naturalized American Maxime Cressy, n.51 in the ranking, in the final of the 250cc tournament in Montpellier, the South Tyrolean put all the right cards on the table to win without damning himself, closing the match in two sets with a score of 7 -6, 6-3. “The key to success was above all being able to always keep my serve – explained Sinner hotly -. Then he started the tie-break badly and I remained concentrated. In the second set, I made good use of the only opportunity that he gave me”. Back from yesterday’s marathon with the Norwegian Holger Rune, n.9 in the world, and faced with the concreteness of the blue, Cressy did what he could on the pitch, giving up after just over an hour and a half of game. Sinner thus became the first Italian to register his name in the golden register of the tournament. Above all, however, it is the seventh ATP title out of eight finals played, the first after the trophy won in Umag last July. The South Tyrolean was beaten only once in the final, in 2021 at the Masters 1000 in Miami, when he lost to the Pole Hubert Hurkacz. From tomorrow he will be No. 14 in the world and will begin to think about the next tournament, the ATP 500, the first of the 2023 season, in Rotterdam, where the draw put him on a collision course in the second round with Stefanos Tsitsipas. If yesterday the South Tyrolean had to work hard to get rid of the 18-year-old French rampant Arthur Fils, today he appeared on the court with the right tension, also thanks to the advantage of having won the only precedent in three sets with Cressy, the 25-year-old born in Paris, in the Lexington Challenger back in 2019. The American, who reached the final without ever losing his serve, took a serious risk already in the opening game, where he was forced to recover from 15-40 before signing the 1- 0 with the first ace. In the fourth game it was the blue’s turn to recover from 0-40 but two aces allowed him to keep the 2-2. In the first set, no break points were seen, with the contenders clinging to their respective innings. So it was the tie-break that decided: a double fault and a wrong volley from the American allowed Sinner to leap ahead 4-0, Cressy tried to come back but the Italian managed to stop him and close by 7 points at 3 at the first useful chance. At the start of the second half, Cressy’s tactic – the only possible one for him – hasn’t changed: risking a lot on serve, even with the second half, to try to take the net and close the rally as soon as possible. To make things more complicated for him – in addition to the pain in the middle finger of his right hand, which had already given him problems in the semi-final with Rune – a thumb injury arrived, such as to induce him on 3-2 for Sinner to also ask for surgery of the trainer. In the eighth game, the blue became the first in the entire tournament to break Cressy’s service and in the wake he didn’t miss the opportunity to close the match with the second match-point, on a forehand volley on the net from American.