Sinner Survives Five-Set Scare to Open His Wimbledon Defence
Defending champion Jannik Sinner trailed two sets to one before beating Miomir Kecmanovic in five on Centre Court to start his title defence.
Jannik Sinner needed three hours and 30 minutes, two falls and a long argument with his own forehand before he could call his Wimbledon title defence safely launched. The world No. 1 beat Miomir Kecmanovic 4-6, 6-3, 6-7(6), 6-2, 6-3 on Centre Court on Monday, having trailed two sets to one against a man ranked 50th in the world.
It should not have been this close. Sinner sprayed 52 unforced errors, lost the opening set, and dropped a third-set tiebreak he had led. Then he steadied — the way the very best players do once the panic clears — and took the last two sets for the loss of five games.
Kecmanovic, a Serb who has spent his career around the edges of the top 50, played the match of someone with nothing to protect. He chased everything, kept the rallies long, and forced Sinner into the kind of grinding tennis grass is supposed to make impossible. The ATP noted two awkward falls from the champion, the sort of slips that make a defending finalist hold his breath.
The reassuring part, and the worrying part
For Sinner, the win counts and the manner of it lingers. The reassuring read is that a champion found a way on a bad day, on a surface where one loose set can end a fortnight. The worrying read is that the bad day came in round one, against an opponent he was expected to handle in straight sets, and that 52 errors on a quick court is a number that gets punished by the players waiting deeper in the draw.
Grass rewards the server and the brave, and for two sets Kecmanovic was both. Sinner survived the scare partly on class and partly on stamina, wearing the Serb down once the match passed the three-hour mark. That is a useful thing to know about yourself in late June, even if you would rather have learned it later.
The two men were not strangers. Kecmanovic had recalled a 2019 meeting with a "quiet, shy" young Sinner before this one, the kind of pre-match memory that means little until an underdog plays as if he believes the gap has closed. For three sets, it had. Sinner's serve held him together when his groundstrokes would not, and his return did the rest once the legs went out of the Serb.
He moves on to face Portugal's Nuno Borges in the second round on Wednesday, a tidier assignment on paper. What Monday showed is that the paper does not always hold on grass, and that the defending champion, for all his ranking, can be dragged into a street fight by a man with nothing to lose and a good return.
