Great triumph for the Spaniard against the Pole, one of the favorites to go far at Wimbledon
Tremendous match in five sets, with Davidovich close to 3-0 but then flirting with defeat
The Spanish Alejandro Davidovich needed five match points, after being on the verge of defeat, to beat the Polish Hubert Hurkacz (7-6 (4), 6-4, 5-7, 2-6 and 7-6 (8) ) in the first round at Wimbledon.
Davidovich, who had just injured a finger last week at Eastbourne, where he had to retire, He saved a very rare match, which he was able to sentence in three sets, when he had a 40-0 serve, with three match points, and which was complicated to the point of being two points from defeat in the fifth set.
Hurkacz, who had only come back from two sets down on one occasion in his career (first round of Australia 2020), bordered on the feat, saving the first three match points against and chaining a 9-2 run in games that allowed to sign up the third and fifth set.
The Pole had victory in his hand. He was break up in the fifth and went 5-4 and 30-0 on his serve. At that point, Hurkacz, a semi-finalist here last year and the seventh seed, volleyed into a sliding Davidovich to pass the Pole and start a comeback that culminated in the super playoff. This year, for the first time the Grand Slams have unified the criteria to decide the fifth set and the match ended with a tiebreaker to the first to reach ten points.
Hurkacz, who always led, enjoyed a 7-4 run to seal the pass, but Davidovich linked five points in a row and had two more game balls on serve. The first one caught him in the net, but in the second Hurkacz threw a backhand into the net and gave the match, turned into a roller coaster, to Davidovich.
In this way, the man from Malaga achieved his third victory against a ‘top ten’ of his career, the second of the year after beating Novak Djokovic in Monte Carlo and for the first time he wins a match in the final table of the tournament, where he won in the junior category in 2017.
His next rival will be the Argentine Federico Coria or the Czech Jiri Vesely.