Nadal beats Djokovic to win tenth Rome Masters

Rafael Nadal at the Rome Masters

  ROME - Rafael Nadal has won his 10th Rome Masters, and 88th ATP title, after beating the world No. 1 Novak Djokovic 7-5 1-6 6-3 on Sunday. 

  The match started very evenly, with the Spaniard only managing to break at 5-5 in a tight first set, and then suffered a slight collapse in the second set, losing 6-1, before fighting back to finish it convincingly in the third set. 

  He said after the match, “I think I played a good tournament, I have been playing better and better, finding my rhythm on clay. I had a very positive week and I'm very happy. It’s amazing to have this trophy in my hands for the 10th time. It's something impossible to imagine but it happened so I'm super happy and can't thank my team enough.”

  The last time these two met was in the final of the delayed French Open in November last year, with Nadal, the world No. 3 winning even more convincingly, in straight sets. 

  On his way to the final in Rome, Djokovic beat the Italian Lorenzo Sonego 6-3 7-6 6-2 in the semi-final. Sonego is currently ranked 28th in the world, a career-high ATP ranking, and in the third round produced a shock victory over world No. 4 Dominic Thiem.

  In his match against Djokovic (whom he has already beaten, at the Vienna Open in 2020) Sonego managed to save two match points, and managed to win a set in which Djokovic had been serving for the match. Sonego’s impressive performance was compounded by the fact that his quarter final (against world No. 7 Andrey Rublev), took place on the same day, only three hours before. 

  The 26 year old is rapidly improving and in April of this year won both the singles and doubles event at the Sardinia Open. He will be hoping to take his positive results from Rome to the French Open at the end of May, where last year he made it to the fourth round.

  Sonego is one of four Italians currently in the top 30, with Matteo Berrettini (9), Jannik Sinner (17) and Fabio Fognini (29), in what is looking like could be one of the best generations for Italian tennis. In total Italy has nine players in the men’s top 100 Italians have only even won five Grand Slams, and have never had a No. 1 ranked player.

 

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Lorenzo Sonego