The Roman takes stock of his tournament: “”When I’m fine, the results come and I can play the matches”
– london
“I felt alive again. And I’m proud of myself.” Matteo Berrettini struggles, as a great agonist, to digest the defeat with Carlos Alcaraz who stopped his unexpected Wimbledon in the round of 16, but he still has the lucidity to look at the complete picture and understand that playing a match like this against the number 1 in the world, for someone who didn’t even know if he was able to play a week ago, it’s a sensational step forward. “I played against the best in the world, so I expected this level. But I hate losing,” he says in the Wimbledon conference room, which looks like it was stolen from a cinema.
TRUST
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“I’m proud for a thousand reasons – says the blue -. Of course when you sum up one goes to look at the result, and in my career it will leave in the 4th round. But I think it’s something more, due to the injuries and how I’m back. This time I managed to force myself into a situation in which in the past I would have gone defensive: I was in limbo, I decided to push the accelerator. And this thing makes me proud because all the conditions told me to stop: no I had a match, trust, certainties, physically I didn’t know where it was. It would have been easier to stay at home and watch, but instead I chose the more difficult path and it is the thing that makes me proudest and that I take away with me because even in future it will be important to remember this”.
THE FUTURE
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Matteo will take a few days to reflect, to figure out what to do to make sure he feels good, because “When I’m good, the results come and I can play the games”. However, the mind is still in the present, in that spectacular match against Alcaraz lost 6-3 3-6 3-6 3-6. “After the first break I got distracted – he explains -. Carlos puts you in a position to always be at the limit and I think he found a way to not make me feel at ease on the pitch. I was very happy to play, but I felt I was getting to the key stages of the tournament and I felt a bit… frenzied. I managed it less well than the other days. But it’s thanks to Carlos, to how he played: I felt I could do much better, but I told myself I had to think only to what I could do now, not what I could have done”.
RESTART
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Berrettini has a tournament to be proud of. “It’s hard to say it was a good tournament after losing, but I know it was,” he says. it’s something to be proud of. I’m a competitive player: I felt that playing was what I wanted to do, what I like. This time I wasn’t good enough.”
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